This work offers phonologists new evidence that viewing vowel harmony through the lens of relativized minimality has the potential to unify different levels of linguistic representation and different domains of empirical inquiry in a unified framework.

Phonology - the study of how the sounds of speech are represented in our minds - is one of the core areas of linguistic theory, and is central to the study of human language. This handbook brings together the world's leading experts in phonology to present the most comprehensive and detailed overview of the field. Focusing on research and the most influential theories, the authors discuss each of the central issues in phonological theory, explore a variety of empirical phenomena, and show how phonology interacts with other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology, phonetics, and language acquisition. Providing a one-stop guide to every aspect of this important field, The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology will serve as an invaluable source of readings for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, an informative overview for linguists and a useful starting point for anyone beginning phonological research.

This handbook provides a detailed account of the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a pattern according to which all vowels within a word must agree for some phonological property or properties. Vowel harmony has been central in the development of phonological theories thanks to its cluster of remarkable properties, notably its typically 'unbounded' character and its non-locality, and because it forms part of the phonology of most world languages. The five parts of this volume cover all aspects of vowel harmony from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Part I outlines the types of vowel harmony and some unusual cases, before Part II explores structural issues such as vowel inventories, the interaction of vowel harmony and morphological structure, and locality. The chapters in Part III provide an overview of the various theoretical accounts of the phenomenon, as well as bringing in insights from language acquisition and psycholinguistics, while Part IV focuses on the historical life cycle of vowel harmony, looking at topics such as phonetic factors and the effect of language contact. The final part contains 31 chapters that present data and analysis of vowel harmony across all major language families as well as several isolates, constituting the broadest coverage of the phenomenon to date.

This book deals with the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a phonological process whereby all the vowels in a word are required to share a specific phonological property, such as front or back articulation. Vowel harmony occurs in the majority of languages of the world, though only in very few European languages, and has been a central concern in phonological theory for many years. In this volume, Harry van der Hulst puts forward a new theory of vowel harmony, which accounts for the patterns of and exceptions to this phenomenon in the widest range of languages ever considered. The book begins with an overview of the general causes of asymmetries in vowel harmony systems. The two following chapters provide a detailed account of a new theory of vowel harmony based on unary elements and licensing, which is embedded in a general dependency-based theory of phonological structure. In the remaining chapters, this theory is applied to a variety of vowel harmony phenomena from typologically diverse languages, including palatal harmony in languages such as Finnish and Hungarian, labial harmony in Turkic languages, and tongue root systems in Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Tungusic languages. The volume provides a valuable overview of the diversity of vowel harmony in the languages of the world and is essential reading for phonologists of all theoretical persuasions.

This work elucidates the nature of the notion of Locality in phonology, describing the minimal conditions under which sounds assimilate to one another. The central thesis is that a sound can assimilate to another sound only if gestural contiguity is established between these two sounds. The argument supporting the central thesis of this book is unique in bringing evidence from articulatory dynamics, electromyography, and cross-linguistic sound patterns to converge on the same notion of locality in phonology. This book will be of particular interest to researchers in phonetics, phonology, and morphology, as well as to cognitive scientists interested in how the grammar may include constraints that emerge from the physical aspects of speech.

Available online or as a five-volume print set, The Blackwell Companion to Phonology is a major reference work drawing together 124 new contributions from leading international scholars in the field. It will be indispensable to students and researchers in the field for years to come. Key Features: Full explorations of all the most important ideas and key developments in the field Documents major insights into human language gathered by phonologists in past decades; highlights interdisciplinary connections, such as the social and computational sciences; and examines statistical and experimental techniques Offers an overview of theoretical positions and ongoing debates within phonology at the beginning of the twenty-first century An extensive reference work based on the best and most recent scholarly research – ideal for advanced undergraduates through to faculty and researchers Publishing simultaneously in print and online; visit www.companiontophonology.com for full details Additional features of the online edition (ISBN: 978-1-4443-3526-2): Powerful searching, browsing, and cross-referencing capabilities, including Open URL linking, with all entries classified by key topic, subject, place, people, and period For those institutions already subscribing to Blackwell Reference Online, it offers fully integrated and searchable content with the comprehensive Handbooks in Linguistics series

The Handbook of Phonological Theory, second edition offers an innovative and detailed examination of recent developments in phonology, and the implications of these within linguistic theory and related disciplines. Revised from the ground-up for the second edition, the book is comprised almost entirely of newly-written and previously unpublished chapters Addresses the important questions in the field including learnability, phonological interfaces, tone, and variation, and assesses the findings and accomplishments in these domains Brings together a renowned and international contributor team Offers new and unique reflections on the advances in phonological theory since publication of the first edition in 1995 Along with the first edition, still in publication, it forms the most complete and current overview of the subject in print

Sonic Signatures is devoted to the representation of sound patterns and sound structures across a diverse range of typologically distinct languages with the overall aim of understanding the nature of linguistic data structures from a principled balance between representational economy and the interfaces of phonology with other domains, including acoustic and visual. The volume embraces data spanning from Nivkh vowel harmony to Maxakalí sign language, and from the representation of consonant clusters in adult Laurentian French and to those found in child Greek and child Brazilian Portuguese. The volume strives towards concrete commitments to the theoretical understanding of empirical territory both familiar but with a novel take (English stress) and novel but with immediate relevance (Hungarian suffix allomorphy). With authors contributing from five continents, the book offers a range of perspectives on the representation of sound patterns, while nonetheless retaining a tight focus on the core questions of which characteristics and signatures are specifically encoded for these patterns in the phonological component of the language faculty.

A revised version of the author's 2001 doctoral dissertation.