Untitled

20 The frameworkhanan 1986). Thus, the most common response to the problem of disjunctivityin both pre- and post-Kahnian phonology was the postulationof curly brackets. In other words, the curly brackets made it possible tocollapse the two contexts into one, which was represented schematicallyas A → B / {_C and _#}. This solution, however, was one of the basic flawswhich contributed to the strong criticism and consequently to the revisionof the linear model. It was pointed out that there was no principledreason why members of the set {C #} formed a natural context for phonologicalprocesses and that in principle any set of matrices could be placedin the curly brackets. In other words, the disjunction involving {_C and_#} was perceived as unnatural since both objects provoking identicaleffects did not share any formal property. Furthermore, since the wordboundary # did not have any phonological characteristics and was notcomposed of any phonological features, its function boiled down to a meremarker recalling that before word boundaries certain processes tookplace just like before consonants. The repeatedly posed question of whata word boundary and a consonant have in common resulted in the reintroductionof the coda and hence syllable structure into linear theory(Kahn 1976). In this way the problem of disjunctivity was resolved andthe processes occurring in the context {_C and _#} obtained a uniformaccount; they all appear in the syllable coda, e.g. final devoicing in German(Rubach 1990, Hall 1992). In short, a non-phonological object,i.e. the word boundary # was replaced by a fully phonological one, thecoda. What is crucial, however, is the fact that the idea to get rid of theunnatural disjunctive context by reintroduction of the syllable structuredoes not answer one important question, namely, why consonants in thecodas face the same fate, that is, lenition. In other words, what is specialin the syllable coda that segments appearing in this position undergoweakening? A giant step forward towards the solution of this problemwas offered by Government Phonology, which introduced empty positionsinto the phonological theory. Thus, in the following section we shall lookmore deeply at the GP stance on the phonology-morphology interfaceand the postulation of final empty nuclei.3.3. Phonological domainsAccording to Kaye (1995), morphological structure can have ‘little’ or‘no’ influence on phonology. To put it differently, morphological informationis respectively either visible or invisible to phonology. Thus, analytic