Blackwell Reference Online

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Virtually all areas of phonology show extensive sensitivity to morphological structure. Many segmental and tonal processes are restricted to apply only across morpheme boundaries (or only morpheme-internally). Computation of stress typically reflects morphological constituency, and phonotactic generalizations often seem to be restricted to a subset of the morphological material of a given language (e.g. affixes). Thus one of the central questions research on the morphology-phonology interface addresses is what types and amount of morphological structure phonology can access and what consequences this has for phonological processes. The chapter is structured as follows: in §2, I will introduce the different types of sensitivity which phonology shows to morphological structure. §3 summarizes different ways of reflecting these types of sensitivity in the architecture of the morphology-phonology interface, and §4 discusses possible restrictions on phonological sensitivity to morphology. Probably the simplest type of sensitivity phonology can show to morphological structure is the capacity to detect the presence of a morpheme, i.e. to determine for a specific piece of phonological structure which specific morpheme (if any) it belongs to, and which morphological type the morpheme is (noun or verb, root or affix, etc.) A number of phonological processes are simply sensitive to whether ... log in or subscribe to read full text