Presented by Kate Mooney, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland
Phonological patterns often bear morphological restrictions. In both SPE-style rules and Optimality Theory, these partially productive alternations are often treated as manifestations of a single, computationally uniform phonological system. For example, rules may be restricted by their order or lexical diacritics, but the core claim is that these rules are not substantively different from those in general phonology. In this talk, I challenge this view. Based on a typological study, I demonstrate that morphologically-restricted and general phonological patterns do not in fact form the same class of alternations. Some patterns are only attested with morphological restrictions, but they never generalize fully. I argue that phonology is not computationally uniform, and present one non-uniform model that offers an explanatory account of the typology.