Cycles, vocabulary items, and stem forms in Hiaki

We argue that class features in Hiaki are not properties of roots in the syntax but rather are properties of Vocabulary Items, the phonological exponents inserted at the end of the syntactic derivation. Irregular morphophonological rules (Readjustment Rules) apply to a particular class of Vocabulary Items in the appropriate morphosyntactic environment. Classifications of this kind play no role in the syntactic/semantic computation, but are crucial in triggering the application of the appropriate morphophonological rule to yield the correct surface form in such cases. The existence of such morphophonological classifications, irrelevant to syntax, is thus an argument against the lexeme, as such, and in favor of the DM-style separation of lexical information into (at least) two lists: List 1, input to the syntax (the source of the Numeration in Minimalist syntactic theories), and List 2, Vocabulary Items which simply realize the output of the syntax. Further, the Hiaki case provides a clear argument for Vocabulary Insertion applying to Root elements (l- morphemes, in Harley & Noyer 2000's terminology), as well as to f-morphemes. In addition, the notion of a phasal cycle within the word proves useful in permitting a simple statement of the relevant conditioning context for the application of morphophonological rules.

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