Phonological theory asks how phonological shapes are assigned to linguistic units. In this issue of the Phonology Yearbook we bring together examinations of the role that syntactic structure plays in this assignment. The focus is therefore on phenomena that have been labelled, in one framework or another, as external sandhi (as opposed to internal sandhi), phrase phonology (as opposed to word phonology), or postlexical phonology (as opposed to lexical phonology).

Spatial location and direction are expressed in French primarily by means of prepositional phrases involving three different prepositions:en, dans and à. Disregarding the usual collection of fixed expressions, lexical idiosyncrasies and subtle pragmatic and stylistic effects, the large generalisation about spatial PPs is that dans and a tend to be used with objects understood referentially, as in (1) and (2) (such ‘determinate’ or ‘particularised’ NPs will typically have a determiner in them), while en is used with non-referential objects, as in (3) (these will typically lack a determiner):

(1) a. dans la prison ‘in(to) the prison’

b. dans une prison ‘in(to) a prison’

(2) a l'ecole ‘in(to) the school’

(3) en prison ‘in(to) prison’

In a recent article in this journal, Roberts (1984) suggests a semantic method for distinguishing ambiguity and generality, a method which is intended to avoid the problems that others such as Zwicky and Sadock (1975), Hintikka (1973), and McCawley (1980) have found in making such a decision. Roberts claims that his test derives its validity from the observation that an ambiguous expression has a disjunction of meanings, whereas a general expression has but one meaning (which might be disjunctive).

The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax (PPFS) is a proposed universal principle of grammar that prohibits reference to phonological information in syntactic rules or constraints. Although many linguists have noted phenomena that appear to them to be in conflict with it, the appearances are misleading in all cases we have examined. This paper scrutinizes four instructive cases in French that appear to falsify the PPFS. Section 1 deals with the alleged relevance of syllable count to the description of attributive adjective placement; section 2 addresses the validity of a rule mentioning consonantality in stating the agreement rule for adverbial tout; section 3 turns to the issue of preposition choice (e.g. en vs. au) with geographical proper names; and section 4 takes a look at a purported case of phonological reference in stating the rule for ellipsis of a clitic pronoun and an auxiliary in a coordinate structure. In each case we bring independent evidence to bear on the problem in order to show that the analyses employing phonology-sensitive syntactic statements are in error and the prediction of the PPFS is confirmed.

The label CLITIC has been applied to a wide variety of phenomena, from words that are prosodically dependent on neighbouring words (as are unaccented monosyllabic prepositions and personal pronouns in English) to words, or even individual morphemes, with idiosyncratic syntactic distributions (like the second-position pronominal and adverbial particles in many languages). I propose here to reserve the term for elements whose description requires more than the stipulation that they may or must be prosodically dependent.

Recent work on morphology – Lieber, 1981; Williams, 1981; Kiparsky, 1982; and Selkirk, 1982, in particular – has extended the notion of HEAD from syntax into new areas in morphology. In particular, these writers propose that in forms with derivational affixes, like English happiness, the affix is the head of the combination; for instance, Kiparsky assumes (following Lieber) ‘that all word formation is endocentric’, meaning by this ‘that the category of a derived word is always non-distinct from the category of its head, in English usually the rightmost constituent (cf. Williams, 1981)’ (133).

It has become customary for linguists (especially generative linguists) to draw a distinction (initially rather unnatural for philosophers of science) between “internal” and “external” evidence. Usually classified as internal are data on the cooccurrence and alternation of linguistic elements in some language, as well as such systemic considerations as formal simplicity, economy, and the like. External evidence is everything else: the use of phonemes in rhyme schemes, patterns of acquisition, comparison to other languages, speech errors, dialect differences, historical change, and so on. The distinction is usually made invidiously--only internal evidence is probative--or defensively--external evidence, or at least some types of external evidence, are relevant and useful.

The distinction arises at two quite different points in the investigation of language. It arises first in the division of labor between linguistics and other fields.

Linguistic analysis possesses both an ‘arbitrary’ and a ‘natural’ component – on the one hand, methodological principles and various means of organizing and handling data; on the other, empirical studies aimed at exposing linguistic universals through the detailed analysis of specific languages, cross-linguistic comparison, phonetic studies, psycholinguistic experiments, observation of language acquisition, and other sources of pertinent data. In practice, the arbitrary and natural components are intertwined, and each makes use of methods and results from outside linguistics in a narrow sense: the arbitrary component contains many principles and methods which are not peculiar to linguistics at all, but are rather the common property of scientific investigation, while the natural component refers ultimately to aspects of mental and social organization and physical properties of the vocal tract, many of which are independent of speci-fically linguistic behaviours and abilities.

In several recent articles the issue of directionality in transformational grammar has been treated, rather unsatisfactorily to my mind. The question is this: are the relationships among the various levels of grammatical description (semantic structure, deep structure, surface structure, phonetic structure) such that certain levels are descriptively prior to others? That is, is there an inherent ‘direction’ to the relationship between two levels of description (say deep structure and surface structure)? Recent treatments suggest that the question is pointless, or that the answer is no. I maintain that this impression results entirely from the way previous discussions have been worded, and that the issues have yet to be approached properly.