A Principles and Parameters Approach to the Dichotomy of Fortition vs. Lenition in Phonology

Introduction of adequately constrained distinctions between some kinds of linguistic categories contributes to our proper and deeper understanding of the linguistic phenomena with which we are concerned. The lexicalist hypothesis on the dichotomy between "lexical" vs. "postlexical" levels in phonology in the 1980's captures several significant intuitive categories, which include the traditional notion of phoneme and that of exceptionless automatic phonetic processes. The former notion has been directly explained by the principle of Underspecification: phonological information will be I underspecified at the level of underlying representation if it is predictable by rules. The allophonic properties of /t/ found in better, atlas, terrace and steer are explained by syllable-motivated phonological rules as are formulated in Kiparsky(1979). The residual unpredictable information concerning the phonological properties of /t/ is its phonemic set of feature values:[+consonantal, -continuant,...】. The latter notion is directly derived from assumptions on lexical specifications within the overall architecture of generative grammar: the lexicon is a conglomeration of pieces of unpredictable information in the grammar of an individual language. Instances of phonological irregularities come from essentially sporadic specification of unpredictable information in the lexicon. Conversely, the attributes of automatic phonetic processes, e.g., aspiration and flapping in American English, are, by the principle of Underspecification, not encoded into the lexicon of the language. This directly explains the totally exceptionless behavior of aspiration, glottalization and flapping in the phonology of American English