Representations Reconsidered (i): Phonological Structure above the Level of the Segment

Abstract

There is an aspect of the phonology of word formation which we did not consider in our discussion of Lexical Phonology. It concerns the phonotactics of a language and the way those phonotactics are enforced by the phonological rules which apply in the lexicon. Let us look at an example. The following verb forms from Okpe, an Edo language spoken in Nigeria, exemplify a phenomenon we have encountered before in this book (data from Hoffman 1973: 86–7)