Rule Interaction in a Serial and Modular Architecture

Abstract

In the preceding chapters, we have developed a modular architecture, where syntax and postsyntax are components which are, to quote Rezac (2011:1), ‘distinct in their computational character and information types, and narrowly restricted in their interaction’. We have moreover argued that the postsyntactic component is itself internally organized with a number of submodules, as illustrated in Fig. 6.1, and that these submodules are crucially serially organized. The focus of this chapter will be evidence for the necessarily serially ordered interaction among these modules, based on the types of feeding/bleeding relations and opacity arguments that have been used to establish evidence for derivational ordering of operations within generative phonology (see, e.g. Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1979). This principled organization of the postsyntactic component into serially ordered modules, with concomitant predictions about rule interactions, has an important precedent within the DM framework in Embick and Noyer (2001).