[This post is part of a series on theories of lexical exceptionality.]

In a paper entitled simply “The treatment of exceptions”, Kisseberth (1970) proposes an interesting revision to the theory of exceptionality. Many readers may be familiar with the summary of this work given by Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1977:§2.3 (henceforth K&K). Others may know it from the critique by Zonneveld (1978: ch. 3) or Zonneveld’s (1979) review of K&K’s book. I will discuss all of these in this post.

Kisseberth (1970)

A quick sidebar: Kisseberth’s paper is a fascinating scholarly artifact in that it probably could not be published in its current form today. (To be fair it was published in an otherwise-obscure journal, Papers in Linguistics.) For one, all the data is drawn from Matteson’s (1965) grammar of Piro;¹ the only other referenced work is SPE. Kisseberth (henceforth K) gives no page, section, or example numbers for the forms he cites. I have tried to track down some of the examples in Matteson’s book, and it is extremely difficult to find them. K gives no derivations, only a few URs, and the entire study hinges around a single rule. But it’s provocative stuff all the same.

K observes that Piro has a rule which syncopates certain stem-final vowels. He gives the following formulation:

(1) Vowel Drop:

V -> ∅ / VC __ + CV


For example, [kama] ‘to make, form’ has a nominalization [kamlu] ‘handicraft’ with nominalizing suffix /-lu/, and [xipalu] ‘sweet potato’ has a possessed form /n-xipa-lu-ne/ [nxipalne] ‘my sweet potato’.² One might think that (1) is intended to be applied simultaneously, as this is the convention for rule application in SPE, but this would predict *[nxiplne], with a medial triconsonantal cluster. Left-to-right application gives *[nxiplune]; the only way to get the observed [nxipalne] is via right-to-left (RTL) application, which I’ll assume henceforth. As far as I know, the directionality issue has not been noticed in prior work.

Of course, there are exceptions of several types. (I am drawing additional data from the unpublished paper by CUNY graduate student Héctor González, henceforth G. I will not make any attempt to make González’s transcriptions or glosses comparable to those used by K, but doing so should be straightforward.)

One type is exemplified by /nama/ ‘mouth of’, which does not undergo Vowel Drop, as in /hi-nama-ya/ [hinamaya] ‘3sgmpssr-mouth.of-Obl.’ (G 5a); under RTL application we would expect *[hinmaya]. This is handled easily in the SPE exceptionality theory I reviewed a few weeks ago by marking /nama/ as [-Vowel Drop].

However, other apparent instances of exceptionality are not so easily handled. Consider two forms involving the verb root /nika/ ‘eat’. In  /n-nika-nanɨ-m-ta/ [hnikananɨmta] ‘1sg-eat-Extns-Nondur-Vcl’ (G 5b) both vowels of the root satisfy (1) but do not undergo syncope. One might be tempted to mark this root as [-Vowel Drop], but it does undergo deletion in other derivations, such as in /nika-ya-pi/ [nikyapi] ‘eat-Appl-Instr.Nom’ (G 4d). Rather, it seems to be that the following /-nanɨ/ fails to trigger deletion. This is not easily handled in the SPE approach. K gives a number of similar examples involving the verbal theme suffixes /-ta/ and /-wa/, which also do not trigger syncope. If a morphemes vary in whether or not they undergo and whether or not they trigger Vowel Drop, one can imagine that these properties might cross-classify:

• Mutable, catalytic The nominalizing suffix /-lu/, discussed above, is both  mutable (i.e., undergoes syncope), and catalytic (triggers syncope) in /n-xipa-lu-ne/ [nxipalne].
• Inalterable, catalytic I have not found any relevant examples in Piro; Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1977 (118f.) present a hastily-described example from Slovak.
• Mutable, quiescent /meyi-wa-lu/ [meyiwlu] ‘celebration’ shows that intranstive verb theme suffix /-wa/ is mutable but quiescent (does not trigger syncope; *[meywalu]).
• Inalternable, quiescent /yimaka-le-ta-ni-wa-yi/ shows that the imperfective suffix /-wa/ (not to be confused with the homophonous intransitive /-wa/) is inalterable; /r-hina-wa/ [rɨnawa] ‘3-come-Impfv’ (G 6c) shows that it is quiescent (*[rɨnwa]).

According to G, there is also one additional category that does not fit into the above taxonomy: the elative suffix /-pa/ triggers deletion of the penultimate (rather than preceding) vowel, as in /r-hitaka-pa-nɨ-lo/ [rɨtkapanro] ‘3-put-Evl-Antic-3sgf’ (G 7a). Furthermore, /-pa/ appears to lose its catalytic property when it undergoes syncope, as in /cinanɨ-pa-yi/ [cinanɨpyi] ‘full-Elv-2sg’ (G 7c). Given the rather unexpected set of behaviors here, apparently confined to a single suffix, I wonder if this is the full story.

Having reviewed this  data, I don’t have an abundance of confidence in it, particularly given K’s hasty presentation. However, K has identified something not obviously anticipated by the SPE theory. K’s proposal is a simple extension of the SPE theory; in addition to rule features for the target, we also need rule features for the context. For instance, inalterable, quiescent imperfective marker /-wa/,⁴ which neither undergoes nor triggers Vowel Drop, would be underlyingly [-rule Vowel Drop, –env. Vowel Drop]. Then, the rule interpretative procedure applies a rule R when its structural description is met, when the target is [+rule R], and when the all morphemes in the context are [+env. R].

Zonneveld (1978, 1979)

I have already gone on pretty long, but I should briefly discuss what subsequent writers have had to say about this proposal. Kenstowicz & Kisseberth (1977, henceforth K&K), perhaps unsurprisingly endorse the proposal, and provide some very hasty examples of how one might use this new mechanism. Zonneveld (henceforth Z), in turn, is quite critical of K’s theory. These criticisms are laid out in chapter 3 of Zonneveld 1978 (a published version of his doctoral dissertation), which reviews quite a bit of contemporary work dealing with this issue. The 1978 book chapter (about 120 typewritten pages in all) is a really good review; it is well organized and written, and full of useful quotations from the sources it reviews, and while it is somewhat dense it is hard to imagine how it could be made less so. Z reprises the criticisms of K’s theory briefly, and near verbatim, in his uncommonly-detailed review of K&K’s book (Zonneveld 1979). Z has several major criticisms of rule environment theory.

First, he draws attention to an example on where the conventions proposed by K will fail; I will spell this out in a bit more detail than Z does. The key example is /w-čokoruha-ha-nu-lu/ [wčokoruhahanru] ‘let’s harpoon it’. The anticipatory /-nu/ is mutable (but quiescent) and it is in the phonological context for syncope. To its left is the ‘sinister hortatory’ /-ha/, and this is known to be quiescent because it does not trigger deletion of the final vowel in /čokoruha/; cf. /čokoruha-kaka/ [čokoruhkaka] ‘to cause to harpoon’, which shows that the substring /…čokoruha-ha…/ does not undergo deletion because /-ha/ is quiescent rather than because /čokoruha/ is inalterable. To its right is the catalytic /-lu/. By K’s conventions, syncope should not apply to the /u/ in the anticipatory morpheme because /-ha/, in the left context, is [-env. Vowel Drop], but in fact it does. Z anticipates that one might want to introduce separate left and right context environment features: maybe /-ha/ is [+left env. Vowel Drop, -right env. Vowel Drop]. The following additional issues suggest the very idea is on the wrong track, though.

Seccondly, Z shows that rule environment features cause additional issues if one adopts the SPE conventions. The /-ta/ in /yona-ta-nawa/ [yonatnawa] ‘to paint oneself’ is presumably quiescent because it fails to trigger syncope in /yona/.⁵  Thus we would expect it to be lexically [-env. Vowel Drop], and for this specification to percolate to the segments /t/ and /a/. (I referred to this as Convention 2 in my previous post, and K adopts this convention.) However, it is a problem for this specification to be present on /t/, since that /t/ is itself in the left context for Vowel Drop, and this would counterfactually block its application to the second /a/! This is schematized below.

(2) Structural description matching for /yona-ta-nawa/

   VCVCV
yonatanawa

As a related point, Z points out that there many cases where under K’s proposal it is arbitrary whether one uses rule or environmental exception features. For instance, in the famous example obesity, the root-final s is part of the structural context so the root could be marked [-rule Trisyllabic Shortening], which would percolate to the focus e, or it could be marked [-env. Trisyllabic Shortening], which would percolate to the right-context s, or both; all three options would derive non-application. This is also schematized below.

(3) Structural description matching for obesity:

  VC-VCV
obes-ity

Z continues to argue that a theory that distinguishes between leftward and rightward contextual exceptionality also will not go through. Sadly, he does not provide a full analysis of the Piro facts in his preferred theory.

Z has a much more to say about the (then-)contemporary literature on rule exceptionality. For example, he discusses an idea, originally proposed by Harms (1968:119f.) and also exemplified by Kenstowicz (1970), that there are exceptions such that a rule applies to morphemes that do not meet its (phonologically defined) structural description. While he does seem to accept this, possible examples for such rules is quite thin on the ground,  and the very idea seems to reflect the mania for minimizing rule descriptions and counting features that—and this is not just my opinion—polluted early generative phonology. If one rejects this frame, it is obvious that the effect desired can be simulated with two rules, applied in any order. The first will be a phonologically general one (with or without negative exceptions); the second will be the same change but targeting certain morphemes using whatever theory of exceptionality one prefers. Indeed, most examples of rules applying where their structural description is not met are already disjunctive, and I doubt whether such rules are really a single rule in the first place.

The ultimate theory Z settles on is one quite similar to that proposed by SPE. First, readjustment rules introduce rule features like [+R] and these handle simple exceptions of the obesity type. Z proposes further that such readjustment rules must be context-free, which clearly rules out using this mechanism for phonologically defined classes of negative exceptions; cf. (4-5) in my previous post.  Secondly, Z proposes that so-called morphological features like Lightner’s [±Russian] will be used for deriving what we might now call “stratal” effects: morphemes that are exceptions to multiple rules. For instance, if we have three rules A, B, C that all [-Russian] morphemes are exceptions to, then context-free redundancy rules will introduce the following rule features.

(4)
[-Russian] -> {-A}
[-Russian] -> {-B}
[-Russian] -> {-C}

Z replays several arguments from Lightner about why morphological of this sort should be distinguished from rule features; I won’t repeat again them here. Finally, Z derives minor rules via readjustment rules triggered by so-called “alphabet” features. For instance, let us again consider umlauting English plurals like goose–geese. Z supposes, adding some detail to a sketchier portion of the SPE proposal, that morphemes targeted by umlaut are marked [+G] (where G is some arbitrary feature). There are two ways one could imagine doing this.

First, either the underlying form, /guːs/ perhaps, could be underlyingly [+G]. Then, let us assume that umlauting is simply fronting in the context of a Plural morphosyntactic feature, and that subsequent phonological adjustments (like the diphthongization in mouse–mice) are handled by later rules. Then it is possible to write this as follows:

(5) Umlaut (variant 1): [+Back, +G] -> {-Back} / __ [+Plural]

This rule is phonologically “context-free”, but its application is conditioned by the presence of the alphabet feature specification in the focus and the morphosyntactic feature in the context. I will take up the question of whether such rules are always phonologically context-free in a (much) later post.

I suspect that the analysis in (5) is the one Z has in mind, and it is also seems to be the orthodoxy in Distributed Morphology (henceforth DM); see, e.g., Embick & Marantz 2008 and particularly their (4) for a conceptually similar analysis of the English past tense. Applying their approach strictly would lead us to miss the generalization (if it is in fact a linguistically meaningful generalization) that umlauting plurals all have a null plural suffix. Umlauting plurals have an underlying feature [+G] (there is no “list” per se; it is just), but their rules of exponence also need to “list” these umlauting morphemes as exceptionally selecting the null plural rather than the regular /-z/. It seems to me this is not necessary because the rules of exponence for the plural maybe could be sensitive to the presence or absence of [+G]. This would greatly reduce the amount of “listing” necesssary. (I do not have an analysis of—and thus put aside—the other class of zero plurals in English, mass nouns like corn.)

(6) Rules of exponence for English noun plural (variant 1):

a. [+Plural] <=>  ∅       / __ [+G]
b.                     <=> -ɹɘn / __ {√CHILD, …}
c.                      <=> -ɘn / __ {√OX, …}
d.                      <=> -z   / __

Secondly and more elaborately, one could imagine that [+G] is inserted by—i.e., and perhaps, is the expression of—plurality for umlauting morphemes. In piece-based realizational theories like DM, affixes are said to expone (and thus delete) syntactic uninterpretable features. One possibility (which brings this closer to amorphous theories without completely discarding the idea of morphs) is to treat insertion of [+G] as an exponent of plurality.

(7) Rules of exponence for English noun plural (variant 2):

a. [+Plural] <=> {+G} / __ {√GOOSE, √FOOT, √MOUSE, …}
b.                     <=> -ɹɘn  / __ {√CHILD}
c.                     <=> -ɘn    / __ {√OX}
d.                     <=> -z      / __

(7a) and (7b-d) implicate different types of computations—the former inserts an alphabet feature, the latter inserts vocabulary items—but I am supposing here that they can be put into competition. Under this alternative analysis, umlaut no longer requires a morphosyntactic context:

(8) Umlaut (variant 2): [+Back, +G] -> {-Back}

Beyond precedent, I do not see any reason to prefer analysis (5-6) over (7-8). Either can clearly derive what Lakoff called minor rules, though they differ in how exceptionality information is stored/propagated, and thus may have interesting consequences for how we relate the major/minor class distinction to theories of productivity. I have written enough for now, however, and I’ll have to return to that question and others another day.

Endnotes

1. I too will refer to this language as Piro, as do Matteson and Kisseberth. It should not be confused with unrelated language known as Piro Pueblo. Some subsequent work on this phenomenon refer to the language as Yine (and say it “was previously known as Piro”), though I also found another source that says that Yine is simply a major variety of Piro. I have been unable to figure out whether there’s a preferred endonyms.
2. I am not prepared to rule out the possibility that /xipa/ is itself an exception (“inalterable”), but all evidence is consistent with RTL application.
3. In his endnote 2, K says the rule is even narrower than stated above, since it does not apply to monosyllabic roots. However, he might have failed to note that this condition is implicit in his rule, if we interpret (11) strictly as holding that the left context should be tautomorphemic. Piro requires syllables to be consonant-initial, so the minimal bisyllabic roots is CV.CV. Combining this observation with (1), we see that the shortest root which can undergo vowel deletion is also bisyllabic, since concatenating the left context and target gives us a bisyllabic VCV substring. In fact, things are more complicated because monosyllabic suffixes do undergo syncope; many examples are provided above. Clearly, the deleting vowel need not be tautomorphemic with the preceding vowel, contrary to what a strict reading of the “+” in (1) would seem to imply. According to González, syncope imposes no constraints on the morphological structure of its context except that it only applies in derived environments—CVCVCV trisyllables like /kanawa/ ‘canoe’ surfaces faithfully as [kanawa], not *[kanwa]—and is subject to lexical exceptionality discussed here. 
4. K glosses this as ‘still, yet’.
5. As was the case with /xipa/ in endnote 2, we’d like to confirm that /yona/ is mutable rather than inalterable, but one does not simply walk into Matteson 1965.

References

Embick, D. and Marantz, A. 2008. Architecture and blocking. Linguistic Inquiry 39(1): 1-53.
González, H. 2023. An evolutionary account of vowel syncope in Yine. Ms., CUNY Graduate Center.
Harms, R. T. 1968. Introduction to Phonological Theory. Prentice-Hall.
Kenstowicz, M. 1970. Lithuanian third person future. In J. R. Sadock and A. L. Vanek (ed.), Studies Presented to Robert B. Lees by His Students, pages 95-108. Linguistic Research.
Kenstowicz, M. and Kisseberth, C. W. 1977. Topics in Phonological Theory. Academic Press.
Kisseberth, C. W. 1970. The treatment of exceptions. Papers in Linguistics 2: 44-58.
Matteson, E. 1965. The Piro (Arawakan) Language. University of California Press.
Zonneveld, W. 1978. A Formal Theory of Exceptions in Generative Phonology. Peter de Ridder.
Zonneveld, W. 1979. On the failure of hasty phonology: A review of Michael Kenstowicz and Charles Kisseberth, Topics in Phonological Theory. Lingua 47: 209-255.