This talk examines countercyclic interactions of phonological processes and discusses their consequences for phonology and its interfaces with morphology and syntax. An interaction between two processes is countercyclic, if a process associated with a bigger domain seems to have applied before a process in a smaller domain that is contained in the outer domain.

Countercyclicity is diagnosed when the process in the smaller domain is fed or bled by the process in the bigger domain, or reversely, the process in the bigger domain is counterfed or counterbled by the process in the smaller domain. The apparent absence of such cases is an argument in favour of cyclic theories of the morphology/syntax interface (such as Lexical Morphology and Phonology, Stratal OT, Cophonologies by Phase, or SPE), where phonological computation is tied to morphosyntactic structure building.

However, there is a limited number of reported cases that have been claimed to instantiate this type of countercyclic interactions. If true, they posit a challenge to cyclic phonological theories. In this talk, I argue that all attested cases can be reanalysed, thus not disproving cyclicity, the key factor for reanalysis being the consideration of prosodic structure.

Daniel Gleim is a PhD candidate in the “Interaction of Grammatical Building Blocks” (IGRA) program at the University of Leipzig.