Two-level morphology as phonology: Parallel automata, simultaneous rule application, and the elsewhere condition.*

Two-level morphology is a system which relates lexical representations of morpheme sequences directly to their surface/phonetic forms, without intermediate derivational stages as in most other generative approaches. It thus draws its name from the restriction of phonology to two levels of representation, and perhaps should more properly be known as two-level phonology. The morphological component is not, strictly speaking, a two-level structure and can readily be decoupled from the system's two-level mapping between lexical and phonetic forms. Other designations of this approach include Kimmo morphology/phonology, after its primary architect, Kimmo Koskenniemi of the University of Helsinki (1983), and finite-state morphology/phonology, since both morphology and phonology are modeled by finite automata (although morphology and phonology are differently organized).