ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the need for some sort of Bracketing Erasure Convention (BEC). It also discusses the motivation for the current version of the BEC, in which brackets are not erased cyclically, but only at the end of a level. The rules of Conjugation a Deletion, Perambulative Reduction, Continuant Voicing, and Suffix Vowel Deletion are rules of the level 3 phonology, yet they must differentiate stems from affixes. The chapter proposes that stems and classifier prefixes are marked with labelled brackets, and that a revised version of level-final Bracketing Erasure, Exceptionable Bracketing Erasure, does not apply to labelled brackets. It considers other rules which apply on level 3 or later, referring to portions of level 1. Such cases provide additional support for the Exceptionable version of the BEC. The analysis adopted supports the proposal of Kiparsky that violations of the Bracketing Erasure Convention are linked to certain kinds of morphology within a language.
