Patterned Exceptions in Phonology - UCLA Department of Linguistics

underlying form /pok/ for a morpheme that is always pronounced [pok]; similarly, she
would construct /kop/ for [kop], and so on. If she never hears [pop], she will not
construct /pop/, and so there is no need for the grammar to repair /pop/, because no such
lexical entries exist. If the constraint against morphemes of the form CiVCi plays no role
except to repair inputs that may not exist anyway, then perhaps it does not belong in the
grammar.
Inkelas, Orgun, and Zoll 1997 make a similar argument for Labial Attraction, a
constraint on vowels in Turkish roots. 4 Inkelas et al. propose a overspecification as a
mechanism for tagging words as exceptions to constraints. Nonexceptional segments in
morphemes are underspecified, and their feature values can be filled in by markedness
constraints at no faithfulness cost. In different morphological contexts, different values
will be filled in, resulting in alternation. Exceptional segments, on the other hand, are
fully specified, and high-ranked faithfulness constraints prevent tampering with those
underlying specifications. The tableau in (1) illustrates the analysis for Turkish final
devoicing: underspecified /kitaB/ (B stands for a bilabial stop unspecified for voicing)
undergoes final devoicing, but overspecified /etyd/ does not.
4 Labial Attraction is a systematic exception to Round Harmony: normally, a high vowel must agree in
[round] with a preceding vowel (e.g., *)tu), but if the preceding vowel is [)] and the intervening consonant
is labial, then a high, back vowel will be [+round] instead of [-round] as expected. Round Harmony drives
alternations, applying across a suffix boundary, but Labial Attraction holds only within morphemes (and
even within morphemes, there are exceptions).
3