Degema and the String Interface

This paper reports on some of the phonological properties of Degema, a language spoken in the south of Nigeria, and focusses on the occurence of endoclitics, which allow for interesting insights into the interplay of syntax, lexicon, postlexical phonological rules and prosody. This phenomenon presents a problem for current linguistic analysis, specifically to the concepts of modularity and lexical integrity, and requires a clear positioning of the different modules and the respective 'strings'. On the basis of the Degema data, this paper proposes an architecture that allows for the analysis of endoclisis, respects modularity and keeps the principle of lexical integrity intact.