An Overview of Lexical Phonology

This article reviews Lexical Phonology, a theory of rules and derivations. Rules are of three types: cyclic rules, postcyclic rules, and postlexical rules. Various diagnostic properties of rules are discussed, including the phonological cycle, word vs. phrase domain application, the Strict Cyclicity Constraint, derived environments, the Structure Preservation Constraint, lexical conditioning, and the interaction of phonology and morphology. The data are drawn from English, Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Slovak. Lexical Phonology grew out of The Sound Pattern of English (SPE hereafter; Chomsky and Halle 1968) as a refinement of the structure of the phonological and the morphological components of the grammar. The roots of Lexical Phonology go back to Kiparsky (1973), Mascaró (1976), Halle (1978), and Rubach (1981). The opening paper for the theory was Kiparsky’s (1982) ‘From Cyclic to Lexical Phonology’. The lexical framework inspired the research of the 1980s and 1990s, as I explain in Section 6. Today, Lexical Phonology remains the source of insight especially in two lines of phonological investigation: Distributed Morphology (DM) and Derivational Optimality Theory (DOT). It is for this reason that the theory merits attention in spite of the fact that it is no longer practised in the form as described in this article. Lexical Phonology is a theory of rules and derivations. It is a theory of rules, because it claims that rules are universally of three types: cyclic rules, postcyclic rules, and postlexical rules. It is a theory of derivations, because it claims that the way in which the derivation is organized is crucial to phonological analysis. In particular, some derivations proceed in steps, called cycles, while others do not. Non-cyclic derivations are of two types: word level derivations and postsyntactic derivations. Lexical Phonology is an extreme embodiment of Chomsky’s (1970) lexicalist hypothesis. It is extreme because it claims that all word formation, including inflection, takes place in the lexicon. Furthermore, word formation rules (WFR hereafter) interact with a subset of phonological rules called cyclic rules. This interaction is possible, because cyclic