Introduction: syntactic influences on phonological rules

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). We have organised the eleven articles into three groups. In the first group are four articles addressing the issue of what domains phonological rules apply in. There is no question that there are phonological rules applying in purely phonological, or prosodic, domains (P2 rules, in the terminology of Kaisse i985); rules traditionally classified as allophonic, in particular, are all of this sort. There is also no question that prosodic domains can be related to syntactic (and morphological) domains in systematic, though often rather complex ways, so that syntactic structure on many occasions influences the applicability of P2 rules but indirectly, via the mediation of the principles relating syntactic domains to prosodic domains. What is in question in our first group of articles is whether there are phonological rules subject to conditions that are best stated directly in terms of syntactic domains (Pi rules, in Kaisse's terminology). Odden, for instance, defends a direct-reference approach to the analysis of some phenomena occurring within maximal projections in Kimatuumbi, arguing that a mediated-reference approach couched in terms of prosodic domains is inadequate. The three articles in our middle group explore a new approach to mediated-influence analyses of phonological rules that are sensitive to syntactic information; this is the end-based theory introduced by Selkirk