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Automatic Alternations in Non-Transformational Phonology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2026

Grover Hudson
Grover Hudson*
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Abstract

Automatic alternations, those traditionally understood to be required by phonetic structure, have not been a part of transformational generative phonologies, where alternations are described by feature-changing P-rules. ‘Conspiracies’, the justification of two or more alternation P-rules by some requirement of phonetic structure, have also gone unexpressed. Phonetic structure is properly expressed by non-transformational, non-directional neutralization rules, of which alternation P-rules are partial repetitions. Automatic alternations can be considered alternations of completely with incompletely specified phonemes, resulting from a neutralization of features. If the features subject to neutralization are so marked in lexical entries, this effectively represents the automatic allomorphs, permitting the non-directional phonetic-structure rules to accomplish automatic alternations by selecting the correct alternants in environments of neutralization. (An illustration of this is an automatic-alternation conspiracy in Kambata, a language of Ethiopia—resulting from historical assimilations, vowel deletion, and metathesis.) The result is a non-transformational phonology consistent with the general tendency of leveling—one in which automatic alternations, conspiracies, and all non-controversial generalizations are expressed in a grammar which prohibits ordered rules and requires that all rules and representations be surface-true.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 56 , Issue 1 , March 1980, pp. 94 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © 1980 by Linguistic Society of America

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