Perceptionally constrained repair strategies in morphophonology

The interaction of different parts of the grammar can lead to malformations. This is often the case in the phonological string due to morphological operations. In such cases ill-formed structures can be amended by deletion, epenthesis or feature-changing processes. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the role of the listener in limiting or promoting this type of processes. Blocking the morphological operations for the sake of phonological integrity would result in missing information, while totally preserving morphological information in the way it is initially added to the phonological string would make pronunciation difficult when not totally impossible.

After a general overview of the concept of structure repair, I concentrate on the negotiations between speaker and listener both on setting the sound inventory and on determining the scope of structure repairs. The inventory of nasal consonants in Catalan, and three cases of phonology-morphology interaction in Majorcan Catalan will be analysed, showing how preserving morphological information serves the interests of the listener, and how morphological synthesis can be a bartering strategy when negotiating the exchange of meaning.