Linguistics 23 . Linguistics Academic and Research

This dissertation concerns the morphophonological alternation of lexical items, determined by syntactic position. It considers three types of inflection, positional allomorphy and certain examples of phenomena collectively called "contraction", and argues that the notion of lexical insertion into d-structure, underlying many current syntactic theories, has difficulty in accounting for these cases. The difficulty is that the variation of forms for particular syntactic contexts is often a reflection of certain post-d-structure syntactic operations, such as move-X. Lexical insertion into d-structure occurs too early to be able to consistently insert the proper alternate for a given construction. I argue that the lexical insertion concept conflates two independent processes: the projection from the lexicon of the categorial information composing the phrase structure of the sentence, and the phonological realization of the lexical items constituting the sentence. I propose a model of grammar incorporating the Government-Binding syntactic framework combined with the Lexical Phonology model of the lexicon. This model replaces the traditional notion of lexical insertion with the processes of Categorial Construction and Phonological Insertion. Phonological Insertion occurs after s-structure, i.e., after the syntax has completed its rearrangement of the base structure. In this way, the appropriate members of phonologically alternating items can be identified for a given syntactic context. I also introduce two types of "incorporation" processes within the grammar. Merger occurs at s-structure, combining the grammatical features of two independent lexical items into a single composite set of features. Merger underlies the inflection phenomena studied here. Fusion takes place at PF and has access to both the grammatical and the phonological features of the words it affects. Fusion is responsible for the contraction data examined. Both processes explain the alternation of strings of items in one context with single items in another context by deriving the "incorporated" form from the base-generated string. The model of grammar combining merger and fusion, along with Categorial Construction and Phonological Insertion, accommodates the alternation data in a natural way. Thesis Supervisor: Kenneth Locke Hale Title: Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics RLE P.R. No. 126 162