Seth Cable In some languages, nouns obey a different set of phonological generalizations from verbs (Smith 1997, 1999, 2001). This raises the question "Is phonology actually sensitive to the syntactic categories of its inputs?"
I argue that contrary to appearance, phonology is never sensitive to the syntactic categories of its inputs. Rather, any phonological differences between the nouns and verbs of a language are the result of a paradigm uniformity effect (Burzio 1999, Kenstowicz 1997, Kiparsky 1998), combined with prior, independently observable differences in the inflectional paradigms of nouns and verbs. Furthermore, the Optimal Paradigms (McCarthy 2002) theory of paradigm uniformity effects can be used to analyze particular cases of phonological N-V dissimilarities that, previously, had appeared to offer deep challenges to parallelist, constraint-based theories of opacity (c.f. Bobaljik 1997).
References:
Bobaljik, Jonathan. 1997. "Mostly Predictable: Cyclicity and the Distribution of Schwa in Itelmen." Proceedings of WECOL 1996. UC Santa Cruz. ROA: 208-0797
Burzio, Luigi. 1999. "Surface to Surface Morphology: When Your Representations Turn into Constraints." Ms. ROA: 341-0999
Kenstowicz, Michael. 1997. "Base Identity and Uniform Exponence: Alternatives to Cyclicity." In "Current Trends in Phonology: Models and Methods." Durand, J. and B. Laks (eds.) p. 363-393. University of Salford Publications. Paris-X and Salford. ROA: 103-0000
Kiparsky, Paul. 1998. "Paradigm Effects and Opacity." Ms.
McCarthy, John. 2002. "Optimal Paradigms." Ms. ROA: 485-1201
Smith, Jennifer. 1997. "Noun Faithfulness: On the Privileged Behavior of Nouns in Phonology". Ms. ROA: 242-0198
Smith, Jennifer. 1999. "Noun Faithfulness and Access in Fukuoka Japanese." In "Proceedings of WCCFL XVIII." Bird, S., A. Carnie, J. Haugen, and P. Norquest (eds.) Cascadilla Press. Somerville, MA.
Smith, Jennifer. 2001. "Lexical Category and Phonological Contrast." In "PETL 6: Proceedings of the Workshop on the Lexicon in Phonetics and Phonology." Kirchner, R., J. Pater, and W. Wikely (eds.) University of Alberta. Edmonton.