Morphosyntactic Structure of Phonological Words

Abstract

Many theories of phonology use some notion of "word" as a unit of representation or as a domain for application of phonological processes. However, the determination of when a phonological unit counts as a word is not tied to any outside structure or definition, it is simply assumed as a primitive unit of the calculation. The assumption that the word is a primitive unit, however, is questioned by the theory of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, et seq.). If the word is not a unit on the syntactic side of the derivation, however, then there is the question of where the unit of the phonological word comes from.

The goal of this paper is to present an overview of a theory which calculates the correspondences between the information from the morphosyntax and the phonological domain of the word. This paper highlights a number of correspondences between morphosyntactic structures and phonological words and posits some possible operations on the PF derivation for creating phonological words from these structures.