2 - Raising in Phonology

Summary

Hudson () argues raising occurs in not only syntax but also semantics and general cognition and that this supports the hypothesis that language is part of general cognition. One might then expect phonological structures too to be of a sort found in general cognition, and Hudson wonders whether raising occurs also in phonology. As Tallerman () notes, many and unconvincing are the attempts to demonstrate that phenomena thought of as syntactic occur also in phonology, but a truly convincing demonstration would show that movement, normally thought quintessentially syntactic, also occurs in phonology. Raising is a kind of movement; I identify two instances of it in phonology. The first is where the genitive z ending is ‘suppressed’ when the base already has a z ending (child’s, children’s, kid’s, *kids’s, kids’). The second is a proposed phenomenon of ‘raising to onset’: I present a dependency syntagmatics for English phonology and argue that if it is to adequately account for positionally conditioned consonant allophony and if, as is plausible, weak-syllables contain no nucleus, then there must be raising to onset analogous to syntactic raising to subject.