Noam Faust: Phonetics and Phonology (from the point of view of allomorphy)
This course will be about alternations in form and what speakers know about them. We will aim to distinguih between purely automtic alternations, which are phonetic or phonological in nature, and cases of phonologically-conditioned allomorphy, which involve two lexical representations and the selection of one of them. We will examine phenomena that have been claimed to illustrate real allomorphy and alternative accounts to the contrary. This investigation will take us from the basic generative assumptions about storage and production, through different takes on the division of labor between phonology and morphology, and to a set of cutting-edge questions yet to have been resolved. One such question will accompany us throughout the course: is phonologically-conditioned allomorph-selection performed by the same module that is responsible for phonological computation? What are the alternatives?