Introduction

This chapter introduces Prosodic Lexical Phonology, a theory of the morphology-phonology interaction. The theory has two basic goals. The first is to unify the theoretical treatments of lexical and postlexical phonological rule application. The second is to provide an explanatory account of systematic discrepancies that have been observed between the parsing of strings for purposes of the morphology, and the parsing of those strings into domains of phonological rule application. The domains of cyclic phonological rules are identified directly with the constituents within morphological structure, while the metrical level of representation is simply one of the many products of phonological rule application. A fundamental assumption of Prosodic Lexical Phonology is that all prosodic structure arises in a strictly structure-building, nontransformational manner. A substantial portion of the work centers on the means for generating the prosodic structure which is invoked in the prosodic accounts of morpheme dependence, compounding, cyclicity, invisibility, and cliticization.