Prosodic Structure and French Morphophonology

This study is an examination of morphophonology in terms of the interaction between morphological structure and phonological structure. The goals of the study are to propose a coherent way of looking at morphophonology in structural terms while assuming a certain autonomy of the phonological and morphological components. The study assumes the basic lexical/postlexical dichotomy of Lexical Phonology, but refers centrally to prosodic structure of the type proposed by Selkirk (1980) and further developed by, among others, Nespor & Vogel (1986), rather than to level ordering. The specific processes of French morphophonology examined here include certain aspects of prefixation and nasalization, glide information, closed syllable adjustment and penultimate schwa specification, which are reanalysed in structural terms, in contrast to analyses in the literature relying on level ordering. Other aspects of French morphophonology argued in the literature to be rule governed, such as Learned Backing, are reanalysed in terms of stem suppletion. The study thus supports Aronoff & Sridhar (1987), Fabb (1988), Booji (1989) and others in arguing against level ordering, while following the lead of Booji & Lieber (1993), Inkelas (1989) and others in advocating the concurrent existence of both morphological and prosodic structure.