Untitled

Boundary markers in phonological theory19ternal word boundary, expressed by ‘#’, SPE employs several other types:the full word boundary ‘# #’, the formative boundary ‘+’ and the prefixboundary ‘=’. The word boundary is inserted at the beginning and end ofevery string dominated by a major lexical category such as noun, verb oradjective (Chomsky and Halle 1968:366). This boundary markerplays a crucial role in the operation of phonological rules in that it eitherinhibits or conditions phonological processes. In spite of immediate andstrong criticism of the SPE morphological boundaries (Hooper 1976,Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1977, Aronoff 1980), the boundarymarker # survived and was inherited in its original or modifiedversions by the theories evolving from the SPE tradition. 4 However, sincethe rise of Autosegmental Phonology (Goldsmith 1976, 1979), thepreviously wide operational range of the word boundary has been graduallycurtailed.3.2. Disjunctive context and the rise of codaAutosegmental Phonology constituted the basis for a new research programmegenerally referred to as prosodic phonology which contributedto the observation that apart from morphological units it is necessary torecognise a suprasegmental structure in phonology, e.g. the syllable, thefoot, the phonological word, among others. Kahn (1976) was one of thefirst researchers who demonstrated that a great number of morphemedependentgeneralisations are in fact syllable based. In other words,Kahn (1976) points to the fact that the processes which appear beforethe word boundary # also take place in a different context, namely, beforethe following consonant. Since then, phonologists have observed thata huge number of cross-linguistic phenomena are triggered by the disjunctivecontext, that is, before the word boundary # and a consonant‘C’. See Kaye (1989), Goldsmith (1990), Carr (1993), Roca(1994), Blevins (1995), and Ewen and Hulst (2001). However, itmust be noted here that although the role and nature of boundaries cameunder constant scrutiny by early generative researchers, there were hardlyany attempts to establish their phonological identity that would bedifferent from a diacritic (Kenstowicz and Kisseberth 1977,Stanley 1973, Kiparsky 1982, Rubach and Booij 1984, M o -4See, for instance, S iegel’s (1979) Level Ordering Hypothesis and the LexicalPhonology tradition.2*