Concluding remarks

Although the main thrust of the present work has been the criticism of constraints on
morphological rules proposed by others I have also ventured some modest proposals of
my own. Chief among those was the claim that morphological rules of suffixation may be
restricted to apply to morphologically simple units devoid of meaning and grammatical
properties labelled as ROOT or, alternatively, to members of a syntactic category i.e.
STEM. In Chapter 3 we were at pains to demonstrate that root-based and stem-based
morphological processes have different characteristics. The validity of this distinction
was demonstrated with a number of Polish verb-forming rules.
The body of the book has been devoted to a number of constraints on stem-based
morphological rules of suffixation in both Polish and English. The constraints inherent
in major tenets of the theory of Lexical Phonology have been examined in Chapter 2
against the background of the vast majority of English processes of suffixation.
First, it has been shown how the distribution of English inflectional allomorphy fol-
lows from overall language-specific constraints on syllable structure.
Next, the constraints on suffixation inherent in the major hypotheses of Lexical Pho-
nology BRACKET ERASURE CONVENTION and AFFIX ORDERING GENERALI-
ZATION have been shown to be empirically inadequate.
The Saxon Genitive formative, which, of necessity attaches outside the Lexicon cru-
cially must have access to the morphological make-up of his Lexicon-generated hosts
although the BRACKET ERASURE CONVENTION would have otherwise.
The AFFIX ORDERING GENERALIZATION stipulates that phonological and di-
stributional properties of English derivational suffixes go hand in hand. The stress-shift-
ing suffixes are free to attach to stems unless the latter contain a stress-neutral affix.
The stress-neutral affixes axe allegedly fully blind to the morphological make-up of
their hosts.
Yet, it turns out that these predictions are clearly false. Only a handful (i.e. 3) of
stress-neutral suffixes behave as the AFFIX ORDERING GENERALIZATION would
have it.
Over a dozen (i.e. 14) English derivational suffixes, irrespective of their phonology,
are clearly sensitive to the morphological structure of their hosts in that they attach to
some suffixed stems but not to others.
The bulk of English suffixes, regardless of their phonological properties fail to attach
to an already suffixed stem.
As the latter two constraints are also relevant to the vast majority of stress-neutral
suffixes they clearly falsify the BRACKET ERASURE CONVENTION.
Further constraints on the operation of stem-based morphological processes advanced
by leading generative morphologists have been checked against a sample of relevant
Polish data in Chapter 4.

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96

Both the strong constraint proposed by Aronoff and Sridhar (1987) whereby all stems
remain opaque to all suffixes that attach to them as well as the more relaxed Atom
Condition and Adjacency Condition have been shown to be inadequate to the extent that
the productive deverbal morphological processes in Polish systematically fail to conform
to them. (The common assumption of Atom Condition and Adjacency Condition is that
suffixes are allowed access to no more than one component formative in the base)
The other important constraint advanced by Aronoff and Sridhar (1987) - that no
stem-based suffix induces readjustment rules in the host has also been disqualified as
the Polish processes of deverbal suffixation notoriously trigger off both allomorphy and
truncation rules.

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