Many cases of allomorphic alternation are restricted to specific lexical items but at the same time show a regular phonological distribution. Standard approaches cannot deal with these cases because they must either resort to diacritic features or list regular phonological contexts as idiosyncratic. These problems can be overcome if we assume that allomorphs are lexically organized as a partially ordered set. If no ordering is established, allomorphic choice is determined by the phonology-in particular, by the emergence of the unmarked (TETU). In other cases, TETU effects are insufficient, and lexical ordering determines the preference for dominant allomorphs.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.