We usually conceive of linguistic rules—whether in phonology, morphology, and syntax—as generalizations that apply if and only if their structural description is met. But some rules un- expectedly fail to apply in specific contexts and are said to have negative exceptions. For ex- ample, the English word ob[i]sity fails to undergo a rule of trisyllabic laxing (ob[i]e/*ob[ɛ]sity; cf. ser[i]ne/ser[ɛ]nity). Other rules apply in contexts where (it seems like) they shouldn’t; these are said to have positive exceptions. For instance, wh-movement out of verb complements is generally unacceptable in English but well-formed with say and think; e.g., whoi did you (say/think/*whisper/*ponder) that Luigii shot ti? Both types of exceptionality have proved difficult to integrate into theories of the architecture of grammar.
One approach to apparent exceptionality attributes it to properties of rules (or constraints) by conditioning the application of the rule on the lexical or morphosyntactic context (e.g., Embick 2012). A second approach derives exceptionality from word- or morpheme-level (“diacritic”) features which prevent or trigger rule application (e.g., Lightner 1965, Gouskova 2012). A third approach, specific to phonology, derives exceptionality from the underlying representations of exceptional items with prosodic and/or featural pre- and/or under-specification so that positive exceptions meet the rule’s structural description and negative ones do not (e.g., Inkelas and Cho 1993, Gorman and Reiss 2024). Are these three approaches to exceptionality equivalent? Is one preferable to the others? Are they all necessary to generate the observed patterns of exceptionality? In this class, we will review and critique theories of exceptionality with these three questions in mind. Students will learn about various approaches to exceptionality and will review — and present and develop their own — case studies.
Schedule (always subject to change)
Monday: Chomsky and Halle 1968: §4.4.2, §8.7, Lakoff 1970: ch. 2
Tuesday: Kisseberth 1970, Zonneveld 1978: ch. 3
Wednesday: Gouskova 2012, Rubach 2013 (Gouskova and Becker 2013, Becker and Gouskova 2016, Scheer 2019)
Thursday: Embick 2012, Gorman and Reiss 2024 (Inkelas and Cho 1993)
Friday: Student presentations
Reading suggestions
Becker, Michael, and Maria Gouskova. 2016. Source-oriented generalizations as grammar inference in Russian vowel deletion. Linguistic Inquiry 47:391–425.
Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. Sound Pattern of English. Harper & Row.
Embick, David. 2012. Contextual conditions on stem alternations. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2010: Selected Papers from Going Romance Leiden 2010, ed. Irene Franco, Sara Lusini, and Andrés Saab, 21–40. John Benjamins.
Gorman, Kyle, and Charles Reiss. 2024. Metaphony in Substance Free Logical Phonology. Ms. LOA-004. URL: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008634.
Gouskova, Maria. 2012. Unexceptional segments. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 30:79– 133.
Gouskova, Maria, and Michael Becker. 2013. Nonce words show that Russian yer alternations are governed by the grammar. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 31:735–765.
Inkelas, Sharon, and Young-Mee Yu Cho. 1993. Inalterability as prespecification. Language 69: 529–574.
Kisseberth, Charles W. 1970. The treatment of exceptions. Papers in Linguistics 2:44–58.Lakoff, George. 1970. Irregularity in Syntax. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Lightner, Theodore M. 1965. Segmental phonology of Modern Standard Russian. Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rubach, Jerzy. 2013. Exceptional segments in Polish. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 31: 1139–1162.
Scheer, Tobias. 2019. On the difference between the lexicon and computation (regarding Slavic yers). Linguistic Inquiry 50:197–218.
Zonneveld, Wim. 1978. A Formal Theory of Exceptions in Generative Phonology. Peter de Ridder.