| Research Abstract |
The possibility of the unification of the grammatical operations in phonology and semantics depends on the degree how we identify the structural homologies between the two theoretical fields of inquiry. The axes of the two types of linguistic structures are situated on temporal and spatial attributes of language. I have tried to make clear the points that follow.
The possibility has emerged that core phonological processes such as assimilation, consonantal epenthesis and vowel harmony are formalized as structural merger of phonological structures and that the temporal elements are appropriately assumed to reside between the two geometric levels, terminal phonological features and non-terminal features. A corollary of this approach is to re-formalize such meta-phonological rules as lenition and fortition, both of which brought about by structural merger in tandem with structural erasure. The whole theoretical framework of the minimalist approach to phonology that I here formulated crucially refers to the principle of Full Interpretation that functions to scan the outputs from phonology. The notion of temporal elements comes from Jackendoff's Conceptual Semantics, which supports the idea of homology between the two fields of inquiry, i.e., phonology and semantics.
The present research has identified a structural merger in the process of formation of conceptual (semantic) structures. Jackendoff's rules of conceptual structure formation can easily be translated into iterated processes of merger. In this research I have been dwelled onto the merging processes in interclausal structures, especially those in Narrative When Clauses (NWCs) in English. I have made it explicit that the clausal linkage found in NWCs can be formalized as a merger that is facilitated by access to linguistic templates. It is crucial to note that the notion of template comes from Kiparsky's notion of syllable formation. In the center of this formation processes is situated the process of merger.
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