A Guide To Morphosyntax Phonology Interface Theories

This book reviews the history of the interface between morpho-syntax and phonology roughly since World War II. Structuralist and generative interface thinking is presented chronologically, but also theory by theory from the point of view of a historically interested observer who however in the last third of the book distills lessons in order to assess present-day interface theories, and to establish a catalogue of properties that a correct interface theory should or must not have. The book also introduces modularity, the rationalist theory of the (human) cognitive system that underlies the generative approach to language, from a Cognitive Science perspective. Modularity is used as a referee for interface theories in the book. Finally, the book locates the interface debate in the landscape of current minimalist syntax and phase theory and fosters intermodular argumentation: how can we use properties of morpho-syntactic theory in order to argue for or against competing theories of phonology (and vice-versa)?

Following up on the Guide to Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface Theories (2011), written from a theory-neutral point of view, this book lays out the author’s approach to the representational side of the interface. The book is thus about how information is transmitted to phonology when an object is inserted into phonological representations (as opposed to the derivational means, i.e. phase theory today). The idea of Direct Interface is that diacritics such as hash-marks in SPE or prosodic constituency since the early 80s, which mediate between morpho-syntax and phonology, are illegal in a modular environment where computational systems can only process domain-specific vocabulary. Direct Interface instead holds that only truly phonological vocabulary can carry morpho-syntactic information. It is shown that of all representational objects only syllabic space qualifies. Couched in CVCV (or strict CV), i.e. Government Phonology, this insight is then applied in detailed case studies of Belarusian, Corsican, Greek and the exhaustive lexical inventory of sonorant-obstruent-initial words in 13 Slavic languages,. In this sense, the book is the 2nd volume of A Lateral Theory of Phonology (2004).

The contributions included in this volume arise from the Workshop on Locality and Directionality at the Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface, which took place at Stanford University on 12-14 October 2012.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory provides a comprehensive overview of the major contemporary approaches to phonology. Phonology is frequently defined as the systematic organisation of the sounds of human language. For some, this includes aspects of both the surface phonetics together with systematic structural properties of the sound system; for others, phonology is seen as distinct from, and autonomous from, phonetics. The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory surveys the differing ways in which phonology is viewed, with a focus on current approaches to phonology. Divided into two parts, this handbook: covers major conceptual frameworks within phonology, including: rule-based phonology; Optimality Theory; Government Phonology; Dependency Phonology; and connectionist approaches to generative phonology; explores the central issue of the relationship between phonetics and phonology; features 23 chapters written by leading academics from around the world. The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory is an authoritative survey of this key field in linguistics, and is essential reading for students studying phonology.

Demonstrates how complexity theory and statistical mechanics help define the language groups and model the language dynamics.

Element Theory (ET) covers a range of approaches that consider privativity a central tenet defining the internal structure of segments. This volume provides an overview and extension of this program, exploring new lines of research within phonology and at its interface (phonetics and syntax). The present collection reflects on issues concerning the definition of privative primes, their interactions, organization, and the operations that constrain phonological and syntactic representations. The contributions reassess theoretical questions, which have been implicitly taken for granted, regarding privativity and its corollaries. On the empirical side, it explores the possibilities ET offers to analyze specific languages and phonological phenomena.

This book explores theoretical issues of the syntax-phonology interface within the Minimalist Program of linguistic theory and proposes an entirely new approach to prosodic categories. Conceptual as well as empirical questions are addressed, concerning how syntactic objects are mapped to the sensorimotor system through the processes of externalization. Elaborating on recent progress in the theories of labelling and workspace-based syntactic derivation, this book further develops a null theory of the prosodic domains, and recasts these as the domains of interpretation that are reducible to more fundamental concepts of linguistic theory. Phonological phrases are characterized by Minimal Search, a third factor principle of efficient computation. Intonational phrases are taken to be reflexes of the termination of syntactic derivation, which is formulated in terms of the workspace to which MERGE applies. This book explores the new implications this theory has for the general architecture of grammar as well as for linguistic interfaces. It provides a comprehensive review of the development of theories of the syntax-phonology interface from over the past three decades. The book is well-suited for general linguistic readers as well as phonologists, syntacticians, and any linguist interested in interface research.