Explaining Branchingness Effects in Phrasal Phonology

A wide variety of languages have been shown to have phonological rules whose domains of application are larger than words but smaller than intonational phrases or utterances. Within the theory of prosodic phonology, such rules correspond to the level of the Phonological Phrase, and for convenience I will use the cover term phrasal rules for them. However, the goal of this paper is to show that these rules do not comprise a single uniform class, but rather have two distinct sets of properties, which are argued to correspond to two separate stages of domain specification. This treatment offers some explanation for why different phrasal rules have different properties, and brings to light several correlations of potential interest that are otherwise obscured.