Zwicky (1985) has argued that an adequate realizational theory of morphology must incorporate RULES OF REFERRAL in order to account for some kinds of inflectional syncretism. In this paper I propose a formal theory of rules of referral within the broader framework of PARADIGM FUNCTION MORPHOLOGY. This theory affords a precise account of a range of rule interactions involving rules of referral; in addition, it furnishes a simple explanation for the fact that syncretisms don't always encompass whole words, for the fact that some referrals are bidirectional, and for the fact that two or more referrals may participate successively or simultaneously in the definition of a single instance of syncretism.

Though both Chinese and Japanese allow resultative compounds of the form Vcause-Vresult, Japanese resultative compounds do not show the semantic ambiguities that their Chinese counterparts have. I argue that this difference results from the interaction of three factors. First, resultative compounds are morphologically head-initial in Chinese but head-final in Japanese. Secondly, resultative compounds are also associated with an event structure whose head is always represented by Vcause of the compound. Thirdly, a universal condition requiring iconic representation of the temporal relations between two subevents makes Vcause linearly precede Vresult. The result of this work supports the claim that many differences among languages can be accounted for with universal principles plus simple parametric variations.

A commonly made, but rarely defended, assumption is that phonetic reduction processes apply to hyperarticulated phonetic targets. Results from experiments reported in this paper support this assumption. In various experimental conditions, listeners adjusted the input parameters of a speech synthesizer until the vowels it produced sounded like the vowels found in a set of example words. A preliminary study indicated that the method of adjustment is a feasible tool for studying vowel systems. Interestingly, listeners in the study chose vowels that were systematically different from those measured in productions of the set of example words: high vowels were higher, low vowels were lower, front vowels were farther front, and back vowels were farther back. We hypothesized that this extreme vowel space corresponds to phonetic targets that are hyperarticulated: HYPERSPACE. This hypothesis was tested in the two main experiments. The first experiment controlled for possible effects of instructions and phonetic training on the listeners' choices. In the second experiment, we improved the naturalness and distinctiveness of the synthetic vowels. The results indicate that the extreme vowels chosen by the listeners were consistent with those produced in hyperarticulated speech; moreover, the hyperspace effect is robust across experimental conditions. These results validate the hypothesis that phonetic targets are hyperarticulated, and are consistent with a two-stage model of phonetic implementation: at the first stage distinctive features are mapped to hyperarticulated phonetic targets, and at the second stage these phonetic targets are reduced.

‘Geminate inalterability’ is the well-known phenomenon whereby a rule affecting singleton segments fails to alter comparable geminates. Past accounts have attributed inalterability to geminate-specific constraints on rule application. Two new generalizations point in a radically different direction. First, rules respecting inalterability are purely structure-filling (never structure-changing). Second, inalterability occurs also among singletons. We develop a new theory attributing inalterability to prespecification: geminate (and singleton) inalterability follows solely from the Elsewhere Condition. This explains not only the convergence of regular geminates and irregular singletons, but also the asymmetry among rule types sensitive to inalterability. Geminate-specific constraints on rule application are neither necessary nor sufficient to account for inalterability.