The main aim of the course will be to present a substantially refined version of Government Phonology, in which, first of all, all surface clusters will be viewed as sequences of onsets and nuclei at the phonological level, some cherished principles are abandoned or redefined (e.g. Proper Government, Empty Category Principles), while parameters are turned into non-rerankable scales.
However, the course will begin with a discussion of basic tenets of Standard Government Phonology with particular focus on the principles and parameters determining phonological representations above the level of melody. The following issues will be discussed: GOVERNMENT, LICENSING and the effects following from them such as binarity effects, phonotactics, closed syllable shortening, compensatory lengthening, epenthesis; EMPTY NUCLEI and the accompanying effects such as vowel - zero alternations, the status of word-final consonants as onsets, etc.
This brief introduction to Standard Government Phonology views on phonological representation will serve as a spring board for the introduction to a redefined model which will strive to do equally well and sometimes even better in allowing us to understand such phenomena as: syllable markedness, complex clusters in Polish, vowel - zero alternations in polish, supper heavy rhymes in English and Dutch, the peculiar behaviour of schwas in Dutch, morphology - phonology interaction in Polish with respect to vowel - zero alternations at the right edge of the words, as well as with respect to vocalization of prefixes. We will also try to define the phonological conditioning for such lexical(?) processes as metathesis.