Sign-Based Morphology and Phonology

Sign-Based Morphology and Phonology with special attention to Optimality Theory In this dissertation, I develop Sign-Based Morphology, a novel, comprehensive, declarative theory of the phonology-morphology interface. Theories of morphology are traditionally assigned one of the following classifications: Item-and-Arrangement, Item-and-Process, and Word-and-Paradigm. Sign-Based Morphology shares properties of all three approaches. It combines insights from constituent structure-based views of morphology on the one hand and realizational views on the other, thus building on ideas in both item-and-arrangement and item-and-process approaches to morphology. It also has a plausible paradigmatic interpretation, thus incorporating insights of the Word-and-Paradigm approach as well. By using insights from these approaches to morphology, which are usually assumed to be mutually incompatible, Sign-Based Morphology manages not only to capture all their advantages, but also to avoid their pitfalls. Sign-Based Morphology offers principled accounts of cyclic as well as noncyclic phonological effects. Furthermore, it relates the cyclic-noncyclic contrast to independently motivated morphological properties of forms. Bracket Erasure effects follow in a straightforward way from the basic architecture without any brackets or any erasure. I also show how challenges to Bracket Erasure can be dealt with. The explicit sign-based architecture of Sign-Based Morphology, and its use of lexical type hierarchies allows it to capitalize on a new generalization regarding Bracket Erasure effects that I propose in this thesis: phonology has no access to the internal morphological structure of its input constituents, whereas morphology may (indirectly, through referring to lexical types) identify the outermost morphological construction in an input constituent. Previously, it was thought that morphology and phonology had access to exactly the same type and amount of information. Counterexamples to this were taken to motivate a complete abandonment of Bracket Erasure. Sign-Based Morphology can maintain a strict position regarding Bracket Erasure effects, thanks to its sign-based architecture. Sign-Based Morphology is a declarative theory that derives cyclic phonological effects from static constituent structure configurations. Its existence is proof that, contrary to commonly expressed beliefs, there is nothing intrinsically or irreducibly derivational about cyclic phonology.