How not to acquire exchange processes in Logical Phonology
Kyle Gorman, Charles Reiss
June 2025 

In Logical Phonology (LP), two set-theoretic operations, subtraction and unification, are used to generate a wide range of phonological patterns. Adopting an old idea, feature-changing processes are modeled as feature deletion (by a subtraction rule) followed by feature insertion (by a unification rule): there are no individual feature-changing rules. Thus LP cannot model so-called exchange (or polarity, inversion, or flip-fop) rules that switch the value of a feature in a given environment. Despite the lack of feature-changing rules, LP can compute exchange processes, where such mappings are generated via a sequence of LP rules, either via a Duke of York (DoY) derivation or using opportunistic underspecification. However, the evidence for purely phonological exchange processes is murky at best, with most commenters considering them not conclusively proven to exist. We attribute the unattestedness of phonological exchanges not to the grammatical system but rather the language acquisition device (the LAD). We propose several LAD protocols for setting up underlying representations and positing rules. One such protocol blocks the particular DoY derivations needed to generate exchange processes in LP. We believe these proposals are an improvement on the vague intuitions about elegance or plausibility commonly found in this literature, and clarify epistemological and ontological issues confounded in earlier critiques of phonological abstractness.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009067 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Talk presented CLA/ACL 2025
keywords:	exchange, exchange rule, polarity, polarity rule, chain shift, acquisition, phonology, morphology, phonology
Downloaded:	98 times

 

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