ABSTRACT

This article examines several examples of a type of phonological contrast that has resisted satisfactory treatment within orthodox phonemic and frameworks of The Sound Patterns of English (Chomsky and Halle, 1968, hereafter abbreviated as SPE). The contrasts in question, which for convenience I will label 'derived', involve distinctions which operate in morphologically complex words but which hold only marginally or not at all in underived morphemes. From a historical perspective, derived constrasts are anomalous. In one respect, they are historically and distributionally related to patterns of allophonic variation. In another, they are similar to fully distinctive oppositions in that they involve phonological categories which are susceptible to lexical diffusion.