Exceptions Encoded at the Segmental Level

This paper discusses the need for including treatment of exceptions as segmental-level phenomena in the theory as evidenced from exceptional cases to spirantization in Modern Hebrew. A prespecification approach is used to provide an Optimality Theoretic account for words containing both regularly spirantizing and exceptional segments. Previous word-level analyses fail to account for such forms by dealing with exceptions as whole-word phenomena, allowing only words in which segments are either exceptions or regularly alternating.