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ARTO ANTTILAMORPHOLOGICALLY CONDITIONED PHONOLOGICAL
ALTERNATIONSABSTRACT. Alternations that are partly phonologically, partly morphologically conditioned are a central problem in phonological theory. In Optimality Theory, two types of
solutions have been proposed: morphologically specialized phonological constraints (interface constraints) and different constraint rankings for different morphological categories
(cophonologies). This paper presents empirical evidence that distinguishes between these
two hypotheses. Stem-final vowel alternations in Finnish are governed by a mixed set of
conditions that range from purely phonological to morphological and lexical, from ironclad exceptionless regularities to quantitative tendencies. Using a standard dictionary as the
data base, we show that phonological conditioning plays the dominant role, but in cases
where phonology underdetermines the output, morphological conditioning may emerge.
We then show that partial ordering of constraints, commonly used to model variation,
extends to morphological conditioning as well. The partial ordering model is a restrictive
version of the cophonology model, which is thus supported.ABBREVIATIONS: AG agent; INE inessive; PAST past tense; PCP participle; PL
plural; PRES present tense; COND conditional1. INTRODUCTIONThere are two kinds of phonological alternations: those that are purely
phonologically conditioned and those that are conditioned by an amalgam of phonological, morphological and lexical information. Alternations
of the second type raise an important general question: how exactly
do phonological, morphological and lexical information interact in the
grammar?This question has a long history of diverse answers. At one extreme,
we find those post-Bloomfieldian structuralists who essentially denied
any interaction by maintaining a sharp conceptual distinction between
phonemics and morphophonemics (Harris 1951). The diametrically opposite approach was taken in SPE (Chomsky and Halle 1968) where a
phonological rule A B / C__D could freely refer to phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical information in its context conditions. An
intermediary position was subsequently taken in the various developments
of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (Kiparsky 1982; Mohanan 1986)Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 20: 142, 2002.
2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.2 ARTO ANTTILAwhere phonological rules are divided into two types: those that interact with morphology in the lexicon (lexical rules) and those that do not
(postlexical rules). Both lexical and postlexical rules are genuine phonological rules. Their various differences arise from the way they are embedded
in the grammar.In Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993), morphologically
conditioned phonology has been approached...