This book provides a refreshing perspective on the description, study and representation of consonant clusters in Polish. What are the sources of phonotactic complexity? What properties or principles motivate the phonological structure of initial and final consonant clusters? In answering these questions, a necessary turning point consists in investigating sequences of consonants at their most basic level, namely in terms of phonological features. The analysis is exploratory: it leads to discovering prevalent feature patterns in clusters from which new phonotactic generalizations are derived. A recurring theme in the book is that phonological features vary in weight depending on (1) their distribution in a cluster, (2) their position in a word, and (3) language domain. Positional feature weight reflects the relative importance of place, manner and voice features (e.g. coronal, dorsal, strident, continuant) in constructing cluster inventories, minimizing cognitive effort, facilitating production and triggering specific casual speech processes. Feature weights give rise to previously unidentified positional preferences. Rankings of features and preferences are a testing ground for principles of sonority, contrast, clarity of perception and ease of articulation. This volume addresses practitioners in the field seeking new methods of phonotactic modelling and approaches to complexity, as well as students interested in an overview of current research directions in the study of consonant clusters. Sequences of consonants in Polish are certainly among the most remarkable ones that readers will ever encounter in their linguistic explorations. In this volume, they will come to realise that hundreds of unusually long, odd-looking, sonority-violating, morphologically complex and infrequent clusters are in fact well-motivated and structured according to well-defined tactic patterns of features.

The aim of this book is to demonstrate that, in a representation-based model, the phonological organization of speech sounds within a word is reducible to the licensing properties of nuclei with respect to structurally defined complexities which pose varying demands on the licenser. It is assumed that the primitive licensing relation is that between a nucleus and its onset (O N). There are two main types of complexities concerning the onset position. Substantive complexity is an important aspect of phonological organisation at the melodic level, while the syllabic configurations in which the onset may be found are referred to under the heading of formal complexity. At the melodic level, complexity is defined in terms of the number of privative primes called elements. The asymmetries in the subsegmental representations of consonants and vowels are shown to play a pivotal role in understanding a number of phenomena, such as typological patterns, markedness effects, phonological processes, segmental inventories, and, what is most important, the model allows us to see a direct connection between phonological representations and processes. For example, the deletion of [g] in Welsh initial mutations is strictly related to the fact that the prime which crucially defines this object also happens to be the target of Soft Mutation. The complexity at the syllabic level is defined in terms of formal onset configurations called governing relations, of which some are easier to license than others. The formal complexity scale is not rerankable, and corresponds directly to the markedness of syllabic types. Since each formal configuration requires licensing from the following nucleus, syllable typology can be directly derived from the licensing strength of nuclei. The interaction between the higher prosodic organisation, for example, the level of the foot, and the syllabic level is also easily expressible in this model because higher prosody is built on nuclei. Therefore, prosody may tamper with the status of nuclei as licensers by deeming some of them as prosodically weaker than others, thus producing a non-rerankable scale of nuclear licensers (a " P). The inclusion of the empty nucleus as a possible licenser allows us to unify the scale of relatively marked contexts in segmental phenomena, and also to account for such problems as extrasyllabicity, complex clusters, super heavy rhymes, and other exceptional strings. The role of nuclei as licensers in unifying various levels of phonological representation from melody to word structure is unquestionable. There are other areas of phonological theory which can be expressed in this model. These include the role of nuclear strength scales in register switches, dialectal variation, historical development, language acquisition, and the interaction between phonology and morphology.

The aim of this book is to demonstrate that, in a representation-based model, the phonological organization of speech sounds within a word is reducible to the licensing properties of nuclei with respect to structurally defined complexities which pose varying demands on the licenser. It is assumed that the primitive licensing relation is that between a nucleus and its onset (O N). There are two main types of complexities concerning the onset position. Substantive complexity is an important aspect of phonological organisation at the melodic level, while the syllabic configurations in which the onset may be found are referred to under the heading of formal complexity. At the melodic level, complexity is defined in terms of the number of privative primes called elements. The asymmetries in the subsegmental representations of consonants and vowels are shown to play a pivotal role in understanding a number of phenomena, such as typological patterns, markedness effects, phonological processes, segmental inventories, and, what is most important, the model allows us to see a direct connection between phonological representations and processes. For example, the deletion of g] in Welsh initial mutations is strictly related to the fact that the prime which crucially defines this object also happens to be the target of Soft Mutation. The complexity at the syllabic level is defined in terms of formal onset configurations called governing relations, of which some are easier to license than others. The formal complexity scale is not rerankable, and corresponds directly to the markedness of syllabic types. Since each formal configuration requires licensing from the following nucleus, syllable typology can be directly derived from the licensing strength of nuclei. The interaction between the higher prosodic organisation, for example, the level of the foot, and the syllabic level is also easily expressible in this model because higher prosody is built on nuclei. Therefore, prosody may tamper with the status of nuclei as licensers by deeming some of them as prosodically weaker than others, thus producing a non-rerankable scale of nuclear licensers (a " P). The inclusion of the empty nucleus as a possible licenser allows us to unify the scale of relatively marked contexts in segmental phenomena, and also to account for such problems as extrasyllabicity, complex clusters, super heavy rhymes, and other exceptional strings. The role of nuclei as licensers in unifying various levels of phonological representation from melody to word structure is unquestionable. There are other areas of phonological theory which can be expressed in this model. These include the role of nuclear strength scales in register switches, dialectal variation, historical development, language acquisition, and the interaction between phonology and morphology.

Elements, Government and Licensing brings together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology. It covers three principal domains of phonological representation: melody and segmental structure; tone, prosody and prosodic structure; and phonological relations, empty categories, and vowel-zero alternations. Theoretical topics covered include the formalisation of Element Theory, the hotly debated topic of structural recursion in phonology, and the empirical status of government. In addition, a wealth of new analyses and empirical evidence sheds new light on empty categories in phonology, the analysis of certain consonantal sequences, phonological and non-phonological alternation, the elemental composition of segments, and many more. Taking up long-standing empirical and theoretical issues informed by the Government Phonology and Element Theory, this book provides theoretical advances while also bringing to light new empirical evidence and analysis challenging previous generalisations. The insights offered here will be equally exciting for phonologists working on related issues inside and outside the Principles & Parameters programme, such as researchers working in Optimality Theory or classical rule-based phonology.

This edited book is a collection of studies on protolanguage phonology, referring to the development of children’s autonomous linguistic systems from their first meaningful forms to complete cognitive and articulatory acquisition of language. The volume comprises chapters on child bilingual phonological development, understood as the acquisition or use of more than one linguistic code, whether actual languages, dialects, or communication modes, in an array of contexts. Such contexts include endogenous and exogenous bilingualism, heritage language, bilectalism, trilingualism, and typical and atypical use. The contributed works here will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students investigating language acquisition in bi-/multilingual settings, as well as those working on child phonological development across a variety of languages.

This book compiles original studies investigating crosslinguistic child phonological development in typical and atypical settings, that is, protolanguage phonology. The chapters address topics and issues not widely or exhaustively reported in the literature, such as research on under-represented languages and foci of interest, as well as information that has remained little-known to the field. It documents recent developments on typically developing populations, and atypical developmental speech in children with autism, developmental language disorder affecting speech, childhood apraxia of speech, phonological assessment and intervention, phonological awareness in (a)typical contexts affecting literacy, and motor speech analysis in speech sound disorders. The book will be of interest to linguists and academic researchers, as well as postgraduate students who are investigating child language acquisition in monolingual settings.

This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating to convergence) the disciplinary scope is broad, and includes ethnography, qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics, formal linguistics, descriptive linguistics, contact linguistics, historical linguistics, and language acquisition. Case studies are drawn from Italo-Romance varieties in the Americas, Spanish-Nahuatl contact, Castellano Andino, Greko/Griko in Southern Italy, Yiddish in Anglophone communities, Frisian in the Netherlands, Wymysiöryś in Poland, Sorbian in Germany, and Pomeranian and Zeelandic Flemish in Brazil.

The present volume is a significant and up-to-date contribution to the debate on the relation between phonetics and phonology, provided by researchers from different countries and representing diversified theoretical positions. The authors of the papers included in this collection analyze selected phenomena situated on the border between phonetics and phonology in various languages, such as English, Italian, Welsh, Polish, German, Southern Saami, Saraiki, and many others, in order to shed more light on the nature of the sound structure of human languages. It is the juxtaposition of different theoretical approaches, including Optimality Theory, Government Phonology, and Laboratory Phonology, coupled with their application to the analysis of specific language data, that makes this book particularly valuable and different from other current publications.

The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory provides a comprehensive overview of the major contemporary approaches to phonology. Phonology is frequently defined as the systematic organisation of the sounds of human language. For some, this includes aspects of both the surface phonetics together with systematic structural properties of the sound system; for others, phonology is seen as distinct from, and autonomous from, phonetics. The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory surveys the differing ways in which phonology is viewed, with a focus on current approaches to phonology. Divided into two parts, this handbook: covers major conceptual frameworks within phonology, including: rule-based phonology; Optimality Theory; Government Phonology; Dependency Phonology; and connectionist approaches to generative phonology; explores the central issue of the relationship between phonetics and phonology; features 23 chapters written by leading academics from around the world. The Routledge Handbook of Phonological Theory is an authoritative survey of this key field in linguistics, and is essential reading for students studying phonology.

This book is the most complete phonology of contemporary Polish ever published. It is topic-oriented and presents the fundamental characteristics and problems associated with each topic, among them syllable structure, vowel-zero alternations, palatalizations, and other vowel and consonant changes. Professor Gussmann re-examines assumptions about phonological contrasts and alternations, and raises and addresses central questions in morphophonology. He takes morphophonology to be systematically separate from phonology. Palatalizations, he shows, are crucial to Polish, as both phonological and morphophonological phenomena: their detailed description leads him to a systematic presentation of vocalic alternations. The book develops a Government Phonology account of Polish, but is primarily a description of the language with the model subordinated to the organization of data. All the many examples used to illustrate the presentation are transcribed in standard IPA, and translated. This important book will interest all scholars and advanced students of Polish and Slavic phonology.