Level-Ordered (Stratal) Morphology

Kiparsky, Halle and Mohanan, Booij and Rubach, and Inkelas have sought to develop morphological and phonological systems void of diacritic features like [± Latinate], while explaining the different types of phonological changes that take place at the boundaries of Latinate and native affixes in English. English, for example, has two negative prefixes, the Latinate (in-) and the native (un-). When attached to stems, the Latinate prefix undergoes assimilation across a broad range of consonants, for example, immovable, incorrect ([iŋ kə rε kt]), irrelevant, illegal, to which un- is not susceptible, as in unmoved, uncompromising, unreal, unlikable. Chomsky and Halle posited two types of boundary, a morpheme boundary “+” and a word boundary “#”, stipulating that the lexical representation of un- would be [ə n#] and that for in- would be [in+]. Since “#” was a word boundary marker, only postcyclic phonological changes which occur across word boundaries were allowed between un- and its stem, while morphophonemic alternations were allowed across the morpheme boundary “+”.

Although Chomsky and Halle distinguished two types of boundaries, they could not account for a major generalization: while word-boundary affixes may be attached to both word-boundary and morpheme-boundary (Latinate) affixes, it is not generally possible to attach morpheme-boundary affixes to word-boundary (Germanic) affixes. For example, the suffix +ion motivates morphophonemic changes in the stems to which it attaches: submit: submission; deride: derision, so it must be assigned a morpheme boundary. The native suffix #ing, on the other hand, does not, so it needs a word boundary: ride: riding; roll: rolling. Consequently, while it is possible for #ing to occur outside + ion: positioning, (air) conditioning, requisitioning, +ion cannot occur outside #ing.

Allen proposed that rather than distinct boundaries, affixes are attached at different levels of derivation, so that morpheme-boundary affixes simply attach to stems at an earlier stage of derivation than word-boundary affixes. Phonological rules apply cyclically so that all phonological rules relevant to a given affix apply immediately upon attachment, before the next affix is copied. This is accomplished by Kiparsky’s bracket erasure principle, which erases the brackets around an affix when all P-rules relevant to it have applied. P-rules continue applying inside brackets until all brackets are erased. Level I affixes require allomorphic operations; they are inserted at a higher level than those affixes which involve only regular phonological alternations and no allomorphic ones. This ordering captures the generalization that the “+” boundary affixes tend to occur closer to the stem and not outside a “#” boundary affix without postulating different types of boundaries. This approach is called Stratal Morphology.

Stratal Morphology raises the question of whether there are different classes of operations on morphemes and whether they affect the order of affixes in lexical and inflectional derivations. Notice that this brand of morphology speaks only to the issue of the order of these classes of affixes or operations, not to the order of specific affixes within those classes. For example, while Stratal morphology predicts the order of the set of cyclic suffixes like + ion, +ous, + ity vis-à -vis the set of noncyclic suffixes like #er, #ing, #en, it does not predict the order of the affixes within these sets, for example, why we find derivations with + ous + ity (generosity) but not *+ous+ion, e. g. *generosion. The predictions of Stratal morphology are thus very general and require further specification to be useful.