We usually imagine that linguistic rules—whether in phonology, morphology, and syntax— apply if and only if their structural description is met. But some rules unexpectedly fail to apply in specific contexts and are said to have negative exceptions. For example, the word ob[i]sity fails to undergo a rule of trisyllabic laxing (ob[i]se/*ob[ɛ]sity; cf. ser[i]ne/ser[ɛ]nity). Other rules apply in contexts where it seems they shouldn’t, and are said to have positive exceptions. For instance, wh-movement out of verbal complements is generally unacceptable in English but well-formed with say and think; e.g., whoi did you (say/think/*whisper/*ponder) that Luigii shot ti? Both patterns have proved difficult to integrate into the theory of grammar.
One approach to apparent exceptionality attributes it to properties of rules (or constraints) by conditioning the application of the rule on the lexical or morphosyntactic context (e.g., Embick 2012). A second approach derives exceptionality from word- or morpheme-level (“diacritic”) features which prevent or trigger rule application (e.g., Lightner 1965, Gouskova 2012). A third approach, specific to morphophonology, derives exceptionality from the underlying representations of exceptional items with prosodic and/or featural pre- and/or underspecification so that positive exceptions meet the rule’s structural description and negative ones do not (e.g., Inkelas and Cho 1993, Gorman and Reiss 2024). Is one account preferable to the other, or are they equivalent, or or are both needed to generate the observed patterns?
Schedule (always subject to change)
Monday: Rule exceptionality 1. Chomsky and Halle 1968: §4.4.2, §8.7, Lakoff 1970: ch. 2
Tuesday: Rule exceptionality 2. Kisseberth 1970, (Zonneveld 1978: ch. 3)
Wednesday: Morphophonology. Embick 2012
Thursday: Exceptionality via underspecification. Gorman and Reiss 2024
Friday: Morpheme-specific constraints. Gouskova 2012, Rubach 2013, Schütze 2005: §3, (Gouskova and Becker 2013, Becker and Gouskova 2016, Scheer 2019)
Selected references
Becker, Michael, and Maria Gouskova. 2016. Source-oriented generalizations as grammar
inference in Russian vowel deletion. Linguistic Inquiry 47:391–425.
Chomsky, Noam, and Morris Halle. 1968. Sound Pattern of English. Harper & Row.
Embick, David. 2012. Contextual conditions on stem alternations. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2010: Selected Papers from Going Romance Leiden 2010, ed. Irene Franco, Sara Lusini, and Andrés Saab, 21–40. John Benjamins.
Gorman, Kyle. 2025. A Logical Phonology of some ‘minor rules’ of Polish. Ms. LOA-008. URL: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/009020.
Gorman, Kyle, and Charles Reiss. 2024. Metaphony in Substance Free Logical Phonology. Ms. LOA-004. URL: https://lingbuzz.net/lingbuzz/008634.
Gouskova, Maria. 2012. Unexceptional segments. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 30:79–133.
Gouskova, Maria, and Michael Becker. 2013. Nonce words show that Russian yer alternations are governed by the grammar. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 31:735–765.
Inkelas, Sharon, and Young-Mee Yu Cho. 1993. Inalterability as prespecification. Language 69:529–574.
Kisseberth, Charles W. 1970. The treatment of exceptions. Papers in Linguistics 2:44–58.
Lakoff, George. 1970. Irregularity in Syntax. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Lightner, Theodore M. 1965. Segmental phonology of Modern Standard Russian. Doctoral
dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rubach, Jerzy. 2013. Exceptional segments in Polish. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
31:1139–1162.
Scheer, Tobias. 2019. On the difference between the lexicon and computation (regarding Slavic yers). Linguistic Inquiry 50:197–218.
Schütze, Carson. 2005. Thinking about what we are asking speakers to do. In Linguistic
Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives, ed. Stephan Kepser and
Marga Reis, 457–485. Mouton de Gruyter.
Zonneveld, Wim. 1978. A Formal Theory of Exceptions in Generative Phonology. Peter de
Ridder.