The Duke of York gambit

Abstract

A Duke who has not been satisfactorily identified with any historical figure is lampooned in a traditional rhyme (believed to have been directed originally at the King of France) as follows:The Grand Old Duke of YorkHe had ten thousand menHe marched them up a great high hillAnd he marched them down again.The implication is that this was incompetent and self-defeating activity on his part. Linguists very frequently seem to give evidence of a tacitly held belief that there is similarly something inept and risible about a linguistic analysis which determines that certain structures are assigned a derivation of the general form A→B→A, that is a derivation in which an underlying representation (or some nonultimate remote representation) is mapped on to an intermediate form distinct from it, and then on to a surface (or other superficial) representation which is identical with the earlier stage.

Sympathy and phonological opacity

“…Unfortunately, research within the serialist framework has not yet reached the point where it is possible to say once and for all what the interactional possibilities are. (Indeed, Pullum's (1976) work on Duke-of-York derivations is a rare instance where the general properties of derivations longer than two rules have been contemplated.) Therefore, further study of serialism itself must be a prerequisite to better understanding of those areas where serialism and sympathy converge or diverge.…”

“…These are cases of the Duke-of-York gambit (Pullum 1976), where two phonological processes are ordered so that one undoes the effect of the other. Of course, merely undoing what an earlier rule has done is a uninteresting exercise empirically, so in any analysis where 38 Halle & Idsardi (1997) propose to disallow certain types of Duke-of-York derivations by redefining the Elsewhere Condition (on which see Bakoviƒ 1998).…”

“…In addition, results about opaque interactions involving multiple processes are presented. Then in §5 I turn to a type of threeprocess opaque interaction, the "Duke-of-York" gambit (Pullum 1976), which finds ready expression in serialism but cannot be modeled with sympathy. I observe that convincing cases of the gambit do not seem to exist, supporting this claim of sympathy theory.…”

Synchronic Rule Inversion

“…It seems clear that the absolutely historical analysis in (6) cannot be correct synchronically (cf. Johansson (1973), Pullum (1976), and Kahn (1976)). No internal evidence of the kind available to language learners would justify an underlying distinction between spa and spar, which are homophones in all contexts.…”

Comparative markedness

“…The result is a Duke-of-York derivation (McCarthy 2002b, Pullum 1976: /k/ 6 g 6 k. In rule-based phonology, a grandfather effect is exactly the result of combining a Duke-of-York derivation with blocking in underived environments.…”