A theory of phonology which stresses the importance of regularities in word-formation. One of the major concepts of lexical phonology is the recognition of two different types of phonological rule. These are (1) lexical rules and (2) post-lexical rules. Lexical rules have the following characteristics (amongst others):
- they operate within words, but not across word boundaries
- they are prone to exceptions
- they need morphological information
- they are not blocked by pauses
Post-lexical rules, on the other hand:
- operate both within words and across word boundaries
- are exception-free
- need only syntactic information, or no grammatical information at all
- may be blocked by pauses
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