Exploring Boundaries: Phonological Domains in the Languages of the World

Some phonological processes apply to domains smaller than a word, others apply within word boundaries, and others seem to apply across word boundaries in larger domains. The full range of variation in the size and use of these differing domains is underexplored. This workshop focuses on the empirical landscape of phonological domains across languages and the theoretical consequences of this cross-linguistic variation.

Whether phonological alternations are strictly local, in the sense that one segment is affected by a neighboring segment, or not, such as vowel harmony and tone spreading, they apply within a range of domains. The boundaries of these domains are not always co-extensive with word or syntactic boundaries. They sometimes apply in domains smaller than words. These sub-word phonological domains are often analyzed as due to cyclic application of phonology at distinct levels or strata in Lexical Phonology or Stratal OT, where a sub-word is built morphologically and one set of phonological operations applies to the sub-word domain, often called a ‘stem’. Then word-level affixes are added and a separate set of phonological operations applies to the full word. Word-level affixes are not subject to stem-level phonological operations, because they are not present at the point in the derivation where they apply. Other phonological processes seem to cross word boundaries, affecting segments in more than one word; this is often called phrasal phonology. Within the same language, different phonological processes can stop applying at different points in an utterance, suggesting the need for more than one domain above the word. And these domains do not necessarily always coincide with syntactic units.

A decades-long lively debate has asked whether the variation in phonological domains across languages justifies the postulation of ever more distinct phonological domains, whether this shows that phonological domains are recursive, or whether these effects are determined by syntactic domains such as phases or extended projections that can be built cyclically. In this workshop, we want to take stock of how languages vary with regard to phonological domains and discuss what this tells us about their nature and how the different modules of grammar interact in deriving them.

We solicit abstracts of maximally 500 words contributing to these aims, which should be sent to Exploring Boundaries (Phonological.Domains.2025@gmail.com) by December 1, 2024. Please indicate if you only want your abstract to be considered for a talk or a poster.

This is the second of two workshops on the topic that we are organising. The first one was held in Berkeley in September 2024 and focused on the conditioning factors for phonological domains. The program can be found here.