Is Grammar Dependence Real

1. Introduction It has long been observed that the phonology of a language is not completely uniform. In addition to well-studied free variation in pronunciation of certain words or word classes, phonological patterns can vary by register, morphological category (e.g., noun vs. verb), lexical stratum (native vs. foreign), morphological class (stem vs. affix, reduplicant vs. base), and so forth. We will refer to such variant patterns as subgrammatical phonological patterns. A complete phonological analysis of any language must address subgrammatical variation; indeed, characterizing the range of variation possible has been an explicit desideratum of certain phonological theories (e.g. Lexical Morphology and Phonology, which gave rise to the Stratum and Strong Domain Hypotheses of Mohanan 1986 and Kiparsky 1984). In Optimality Theory (OT) there have been two major proposals to handle subgrammatical variation: