ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the implications of the proposals developed for several important principles that have governed phonological analyses in recent years. These are the Strict Layer Hypothesis, the Exhaustive Parsing Constraint, and the Strict Cycle Condition. The Strict Parsing Condition constrains only the construction of constituents which immediately dominate prosodically licensed material. However, in Prosodic Lexical Phonology, morphological bracketing is inaccessible to phonological rules. The chapter shows that a number of distinctions in the behavior of prosodic and metrical constituents follow from the fact that bracket erasure applies to the former hierarchy but not to the latter. However, in the proposed theory, metrical structure is available at all stages of the derivation. One important empirical difference obtains between the metrical and the prosodic trees generated by a theory incorporating the Generalized Strict Parsing Condition. The difference in permissible structures traces back to differences in the sources for metrical and prosodic constituency.