The phonology of French continues to command widespread attention in the development of linguistic theory. The most recent, and most novel, contribution to the explicit description of sound patterns in this language is Anderson (1982), who demonstrates the central rôle played by syllabic structure in alternations obtaining between null and ‘e-instable’, or schwa. In expected contrast to the natural generative phonology approach advocated, for example, by Klausenburger (1978), Anderson advances the more orthodox generative position (cf. Schane, 1968; Dell, 1973) that characterizes such alternations as petit m. ‘pəti]/petite f. [pətit] ‘small’ in terms of the phonological deletion of basic word-final consonants (masculine forms) and final ‘protective’ schwas (feminine forms). This familiar, ‘abstract’ kind of account has been challenged most comprehensively by Tranel (1981), but it still represents the standard alternative within more or less traditional generative phonology, which, without further elaboration, Anderson and the comments that follow here share as a point of departure.

The article deals with the dynamic, retroactive effects within a clause derivation of various ‘downstream’ specifications (that is, at subsequent levels in the derivation) on the semantic structure and aspectual character of the predicator at the ‘nuclear’, ‘core’ and ‘extended’ predication layers within standard Functional Grammar (Dik 1997a) – specifically, the insertion of given types of argument expressions within the predicate frame and the adjunction of certain semantically marked types of level 1 and level 2 satellites. A third type of retroactive effect is produced via the assignment or otherwise of the pragmatic function ‘Focus’ to the syntactic exponent of a predicate, which results in the singling out of a given part of the latter's semantic structure to act as a predicator.

All these dynamic, retroactive effects on a predicator and the structures it projects assume a semantically transparent underlying predicate structure on which to operate; yet in the standard FG model, no such structure is available via the predicate frame, which forms the initial structure for the derivation of a clause. The article demonstrates the drawbacks of the strict separation of meaning definitions (lexical semantics) and predicate frames (semantically-based syntax) within FG in terms, precisely, of the perspicuous mapping between syntax and semantics. It proposes a semantically transparent alternative to the standard predicate frame, based on Pustejovsky's (1995) ‘Generative Lexicon’ approach to lexico-semantic structure.

This paper examines opaque examples of phrase-level phonology taken from Chilean Spanish under the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory (OT) (Rubach 1997; Bermúdez-Otero 2003, 2019) and Harmonic Serialism (HS) (McCarthy 2008a, b, 2016). The data show an interesting double repair of the coda /s/ taking place at word edges. It is argued that Stratal OT is superior in modelling phonological processes that take place at the interface between morphology and phonology because it embraces cyclicity. Under this model, prosodic structure is built serially, level by level, and in accordance with the morphological structure of the input string. In this way, opacity at constituent edges can be solved. Stratal OT also provides insight into word-internal morphological structure and the domain-specificity of phonological processes. It is demonstrated that a distinction in this model is necessary between the word and the phrase levels, and between the stem and the word levels. As illustrated by the behaviour of Spanish nouns, affixation and the resultant alternations inform us about the domains to which both morphological and phonological processes should be assigned. Against this background, Harmonic Serialism embraces an apparently simpler recursive mechanism in which stepwise prosodic parsing can be incorporated. What is more, it offers insight into the nature of operations in OT, as well as into such problematic issues as structure building and directionality. Nevertheless, despite the model’s ability to solve various cases of opacity, the need to distinguish between two competing repairs makes HS fail when confronted with the Chilean data under examination.