Juncture and Boundary

This article is about the question of how morpho-syntactic information impacts phonology. Its broad subject matter is thus the morpho-syntax-phonology interface. Note that inquiry is restricted to the direction mentioned: there is also literature on how phonology conditions morpho-syntactic computation, which is not discussed here. There are two ways for morpho-syntax to affect phonology: by inserting an object into the linear string that is interpreted by the phonology, or by arranging the chunks that are submitted to phonological interpretation in a specific way. The former proposes a representational, the latter a derivational management of phonology. The derivational means of influencing phonology is implemented by inside-out interpretation (i.e., the idea that morpho-syntactic structure is interpreted phonologically from the most to the least embedded item). This genuinely generative device was introduced in the mid-1950s and successively known as the transformational cycle, the phonological cycle, cyclic derivation, and finally today as derivation by phase (in syntactic quarters). On the representational side (which has been a tradition since the 19th century), carriers of morpho-syntactic information that were inserted into the linear string have successively incarnated as (juncture) phonemes, SPE-type boundaries (# and the like), and prosodic constituency (the Prosodic Word, etc.), each being representative of its time. That is, carriers of morpho-syntactic information were (juncture) phonemes when phonemes were the basic units in phonological theory, they were made segments in SPE (# was supposed to be a [-segment] segment) when the basic phonological units were segments and finally became autosegmental domains (prosodic constituency) in the early 1980s when all areas of phonology were autosegmentalized. Since the early 1980s, the two channels that import morpho-syntactic information into phonology are each associated with a specific theory: Lexical Phonology is the derivational theory of the interface, while Prosodic Phonology organizes its representational management. The question of how exactly both can or should coexist is examined in Division of Labor Between Representational and Derivational Means of Influencing Phonology. Another question from the 1980s that has moved up on the agenda in the current minimalist environment is whether there should be a representational channel of communication at all: Direct Syntax approaches hold that no carriers of morpho-syntactic information are ever inserted into phonology. Instead, phonological instructions make direct reference to morpho-syntactic structure and labels (see Direct Syntax vs. Prosodic Phonology).