A unified approach to domains in word- and phrase-level phonology

Abstract

This paper discusses parallels between the conditioning of phonological processes at the word- and phrase-level. The approach taken here is a direct reference approach in which apparent mismatches between morphosyntactic domains and phonological domains are derived from the spell-out procedure. The analysis relies on two main ingredients, i) inclusion of the output of spell-out in subsequent cycles, and ii) layering of concatenation. Under (i), the phonological output of spell-out is visible and can be affected, however the internal structure is not. This can yield the effects of phonological domains extending beyond the morphosyntactic domain. Under (ii), processes are specified to apply at either early or late concatenation, where early and late concatenation are determined by the selectional relationship between the elements, limiting the application of phonological processes within the spell-out domain. This is first illustrated by the application of umlauts in Icelandic and then this approach is extended to penultimate vowel lengthening (PVL) in Zulu.