A Link Between Phonology and the Lexicon: Morphophonological Exceptionality and Decomposition in English Stress Shift

It is a default assumption of many phonological theories that if a rule applies to some members of a particular phonological domain, it should apply to all members of that domain. However, exceptions to regular phonological patterns are not uncommon, and some exceptions are not easily modeled by phonological or morphological factors alone. This study investigates one such pattern of phonological exceptionality in English, arguing that the way words are processed in the lexicon is crucial to predicting where exceptions will occur in the phonological grammar. The results of a corpus study on English suffixes suggests that the way words are treated in the process of lexical access can predict whether they pattern as exceptions in phonological alternations, posing a strong connection between phonological and lexical processes.