On some problems of rule ordering in Finnish grammar

Finnish wh-movement exhibits internal roll-up movement with pied-piping and is therefore overtly successive-cyclic. On the other hand, its morphosyntax is nonlocal, suggesting countercyclic behavior. The existence of overtly cyclic computations and nonlocal agreement penetrating nearly every cyclic domain constitutes a near contradiction in this language. A solution is proposed which partially resurrects the notion of d-structure: grammatical operations are cyclic and operate in small phases (as indicated by Finnish successive cyclic wh-movement), but some operations, Agree in particular, access leftover copies of elements in situ and are not restricted by the phase impenetrability condition (PIC). PIC restricts operator/A-bar movement, not morphosyntax.

Rule Interaction Conversion Operations

Different types of interactions between pairs of phonological rules can be converted into one another using three formal operations that we discuss in this article. One of these conversion operations, rule re-ordering (here called swapping), is well-known; another, flipping, is a more recent finding (Hein et al., 2014). We introduce a third conversion operation that we call cropping. Formal relationships among the members of the set of rule interactions, expanded by cropping beyond the classical four (feeding, bleeding, counterfeeding, and counterbleeding) to include four more (mutual bleeding, seeding, counterseeding, and merger), are identified and clarified. We show that these conversion operations exhaustively delimit the set of possible pairwise rule interactions predicted by conjunctive rule ordering (Chomsky & Halle, 1968), and that each interaction is related to each of the others by the application of at most two conversion operations.

A Rule-ordering Theory of Blocking in Nonderived Environments

In Nonderived Environment Blocking (NDEB), a phonological process applies across morpheme boundaries or morpheme-internally when fed by another phonological process but is otherwise blocked from applying. NDEB poses a challenge to both rule-based phonology and Optimality Theory: if P is a process that is blocked in nonderived environments, the challenge in both frameworks is to partition the set of environments of application of P into two subsets – corresponding to derived and nonderived environments – and block the application of the process precisely in nonderived environments. My goal in this paper is to show that NDEB can be reduced to rule ordering. I will do so by presenting a rule-ordering theory of NDEB that uses morpheme structure rules. Every rule P that is blocked in nonderived environments will be ordered after a morpheme structure rule R that removes P’s environments of application. Since morpheme structure rules apply to URs of individual morphemes (which correspond to nonderived environments), R will prevent P from applying precisely in nonderived environments.

Morphology and the Rule Ordering Controversy

Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1975), pp. 460-474