Coordination Reduction in Complex Words : A Case for Prosodic Phonology

This type of coordination reduction is peculiar in that internal parts of words are affected by a deletion rule that looks like a syntactic rule, since it is conditioned by the presence of coordination. Thus, this phenomenon seems to violate the principle of Lexical Integrity, which states that the ^nternal structure of words is opaque to syntax, a principle that is also cnown as the Generalized Lexical Hypothesis (Lapointe 1979: 22) or the Word Structure Autonomy Condition (Selkirk 1982: 70). A second peculiarity involved here is that deletion can take place even when the identical parts have a different morphological/syntactic status. In the following examples the deleted constituent is part of a compound, whereas the identical counterpart is an independent word, or vice versa: