A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

126 cycle
phrase-marker (the first cycle), and then to the next highest sentence (the second
cycle), until the matrix sentence is arrived at. On each application, at a given
level, in this view, the rules may not take into account information higher up
the phrase-marker. This principle allows a less complicated analysis to be assigned
to sentences with ‘repeated’ elements, such as The man seems to want to try a
second time.
Various types of cyclic rules have been suggested, e.g. ‘last-cyclic’ rules, which
apply only to the highest level in a derivation. Cyclic transformations
reduce in number in later versions of transformational grammar – ultimately
reducing to a single rule of (alpha) movement – and are constrained by
several conditions on their applicability (such as the subjacency condition,
the specified-subject condition and the tensed-subject condition). Postcyclic
rules are also recognized in the extended standard theory, to refer to
a type of transformation which applies after cyclic transformations have been
completed, as might be suggested for handling inversion, the initial placement
of question words in English (e.g. Where did John say that he was going?),
or in tag formation. A successive cyclic analysis is one where superficially
unbounded movement processes are analysed as involving a succession of bounded
processes, e.g. in What did you say that you would do?, where WH-movement
would be applied in successive steps, crossing a single inflection phrase boundary
in each of its applications. See also phase (4).
In generative phonology, the cyclic principle was established by Chomsky
and Halle (see Chomskyan) to account for the variations in stress contrast in
relation to vowel quality within words and sentences. It is argued that the
place of a word’s main stress, and the remaining stresses in a polysyllabic
word, are explainable by referring to the syntactic and the segmental phonological
structure of an utterance. The surface structure of a sentence, in
this view, is seen as a string of formatives which are bracketed together in
various ways, the brackets reflecting the grammatical structure assigned to
the sentence, such as sentence, noun phrase, verb phrase, e.g. [[the [elephant]]
[[kick[ed]] [the [ball]]]]. The cyclic principle makes the phonological rules apply
first to the maximal strings that contain no brackets; once the rules are
applied, the brackets surrounding these strings are erased. The phonological
rules then apply again to the maximal strings without brackets produced by this
first procedure, and again the innermost brackets are erased. The procedure
continues until all brackets have been removed. Various types of rule have been
devised to make this cyclical procedure work, such as the Compound Rule and
the Nuclear Stress Rule, both of which are ways of assigning main degrees
of stress to the various constituents of a sentence (the first in relation to
compound items, the second to sequences of items in phrases). In later phonological
theory, the strict cycle condition (SCC) is a constraint governing the
proper application of cyclic rules: it states in essence that cyclic rules apply only
to derived representations. See also lexical phonology.
(2) In semantics, the term is sometimes used to refer to a type of sense
relationship between lexical items (a subtype of incompatibility). Lexical
cycles (or cyclical sets) are sets of items organized in terms of successivity, but
lacking any fixed end-points, e.g. days of the week, months of the year. ‘Serial’
ordering, by contrast, displays fixed end-points, as in military ranks.