The Morphology-Phonology Connection
Sharon Inkelas (University of California, Berkeley)
This paper argues for a unified, cophonology approach to morphologically conditioned phonology and realizational morphology, on the grounds that the two phenomena overlap descriptively, apply within the same word-internal domains, and show identical layering, or interleaving, effects. On the cophonology approach, which merges key insights from item-and-arrangement and item-and-process morphology, both phenomena are ascribed to cophonologies which are specific to individual (sets of) morphological constructions. Collapsing the phenomena formally eliminates the many descriptive ambiguities that otherwise haunt the morphology-phonology connection and captures generalizations which have been eluded by other theoretical approaches.