A pseudo-cyclic effect in Romanian morphophonology

Romanian phonology is shown to be subject to inflection dependence, a systematic restriction on phonological alternations. Inflection dependence means that segmental alternations are permitted in the derivatives of a lexeme only if certain inflected forms of that lexeme, its inflectional bases (Albright 2002), independently display the alternation. The study documents this pervasive constraint on alternations and proposes an analysis for it, based on a modified variant of Lexical Conservatism (Steriade 1999b ). The broader significance of inflection dependence is the need to allow access in phonological computations to a broader class of lexically-related, derived lexical items relative to what the phonological cycle (Chomsky et al. 1956) and its descendants permit. I discuss the difference between inflection dependence and the phonological cycle and propose a mechanism that reduces the formal differences between them to rankings of correspondence and phonotactics.