I recently gave a talk at the Canadian Linguistic Association (sort of like the LSA, but Canadian and frankly a lot better because it doesn’t have nearly as many prominent crackpots and cranks) with Charles Reiss on the notion of “exchange rules” as they’re understood in Logical Phonology (LP). Whereas SPE-era theories can use alpha-notation to generate exchange rules, LP can model exchange processes via a series of seemingly complex rules, either via a Duke of York gambit or opportunistic abuse of underspecification. Since it seems quite likely that purely phonological exchanges don’t in fact exist, we suggest that the language acquisition device is constrained so as to not profer analyses of those types, though we also consider that this may be an accident of the “diachronic  filter” of the sort developed by Ju. Blevins, M. Hale, and J. Ohala. The handout is here for those interested, and like other things we’ve been writing about LP, will probably be included in a forthcoming book. One interesting question that we raise, but don’t answer, is what one ought to do about exchanges in Optimality Theory. Alderete (2001), for example, proposes to model them with a family of “anti-faithfulness constraints”. While one could predict the absence of exchanges by eliminating this constraint family, Alderete also uses anti-faithfulness for phenomena other than exchanges, and some of these may be more robustly attested; it’s not clear what ought to be done thus.

References

Alderete, J. 2001. Dominance effects as transderivational anti-faithfulness. Phonology 18: 201-253.