Dan Everett: phonological arguments for late insertion? (reply to Martha McGinnis)

[Martha McGinnis]

There is an interesting fact, not quite like what you asked for, but
leaning in the same direction. In recent field work, a colleague of mine
and I have discovered an interesting process of post-lexical structure
preservation in the Ge language, Suya (no other studies of this language
exist). There is a rule of phrase-final lenition of voicless occlusives
which is blocked just in case there is no lexical phoneme corresponding to
the lenited form. So, for example, p --> w and t --> r, but nothing
happens to k. This is because w and r are independently needed phonemes in
the language, but there is no corresponding continuant in the velar
position.

What this means is that one of the basic tenets of Lexical Phonology, that
structure-preservation is evidence for phonology in the lexicon, becomes
much less secure.

Or so it seemeth to me. The paper is in progress. Hope to have it done in
a couple of months, when I get out from under some other things.

Cheers,

Dan Everett

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001, Martha McGinnis wrote:

> Dear DM-List,
>
>
> I'm looking for references to anything that gives phonological
> arguments <italic>for</italic> late insertion or, specifically,
> <italic>against</italic> Lexical Phonology. The arguments I've seen for
> late insertion are mainly based on the featural underspecification of
> Vocabulary items.
>
>
> If you have any suggestions, please let me know.  Many thanks!
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Martha
>
>
>
> mcginnis at ucalgary.ca
>