Natural class reasoning in segment deletion rules
Kyle Gorman, Charles Reiss
November 2025 

Logical Phonology is characterized by an insistence on a rigorous definition of the natural classes defining rule targets and environments, and by three novel operators which replace the -> operator of classical generative phonology. Following these ideas to their logical conclusion has a counterintuitive consequence for the analysis of segment deletion rules: Delete The Rich: If some—but not all-X's delete in some phonological context Y__Z, the X's that delete must be more richly specified than those which do not. This prediction is illustrated using deletion processes in Hungarian and Turkish. In Hungarian, there is independent evidence for underlyingly distinct sources of h, and these two h's show differential behavior with respect to deletion. In Turkish, positing distinct sources for deleting and non-deleting k allows for a unified handling, within the narrow phonology, of apparent exceptions and an atypical form of non-derived environment blocking. Together, these two case studies show that Delete The Rich is not an empirical problem.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/009501 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Paper presented at NELS 56, to appear in the proceedings
keywords:	logical phonology, natural classes, deletion, non-derived environment blocking, derived environments, exceptionality, hungarian, turkish, morphology, phonology
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