The role of selectional restrictions, phonotactics and parsing in constraining suffix ordering in English

While in (1a) and (1b) -ic and -ity, and -less and -ness happily combine, the combination -less-ity is impossible. Similar sets of examples can be found in abundance and pose the question what exactly is responsible for such patterns. Basically three types of answers have been given in the pertinent literature. One group of scholars argues for the existence of lexical strata (e.g. Siegel 1974, Allen 1978, Selkirk 1982, Kiparsky 1982, Mohanan 1986, Giegerich 1999) with strong restrictions holding between the different strata. This view is disputed, for example, in Fabb (1988) and Plag (1996, 1999), who claim that it is selectional restrictions of individual suffixes that are responsible for the combinatorial properties of suffixes. Finally, and most recently, Hay (2000) has proposed an attractive psycholinguistic