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Description:
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Following up on the "Guide to Morphosyntax-Phonology Interface Theories"
(2011), written from a theory-neutral point of view, this book lays out the
author’s approach to the representational side of the interface. The book is
thus about how information is transmitted to phonology when an object is
inserted into phonological representations (as opposed to the derivational
means, i.e. phase theory today). The idea of Direct Interface is that diacritics
such as hash-marks in SPE or prosodic constituency since the early 80s,
which mediate between morpho-syntax and phonology, are illegal in a
modular environment where computational systems can only process
domain-specific vocabulary. Direct Interface instead holds that only truly
phonological vocabulary can carry morpho-syntactic information. It is shown
that of all representational objects only syllabic space qualifies. Couched in
CVCV (or strict CV), i.e. Government Phonology, this insight is then applied
in detailed case studies of Belarusian, Corsican, Greek and the exhaustive
lexical inventory of sonorant-obstruent-initial words in 13 Slavic languages,.
In this sense, the book is the 2nd volume of "A Lateral Theory of Phonology"
(2004).
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