Frontiers of Phonology is a collection of essays that present a selective overview of recent trends in the linguistic analysis of sound structure. The essays are written by specialists from Europe, Canada and the USA and discuss issues from three broad areas of phonology: the nature and representation of phonological features; the role and structure of the skeletal tier and syllable structure; and the competing claims of derivational and declarative approaches to phonology. The book provides a forum for lively discussion of important theoretical topics from various standpoints including metrical and autosegmental phonology, government phonology, radical CV phonology, dependency phonology and declarative phonology. The contributors, who are protagonists of these different standpoints, compare notes and show the merits of their different approaches. The essays discussing derivational issues offer an excellent introduction to the area of constraints based phonology, and by covering the phonology of many languages the book provides an understanding of how human languages in general use sound. Frontiers of Phonology will be essential reading for advanced students of phonology and will also be of interest to professional linguists as well as psychologists and speech technologists.

This book is an investigation of the basic concepts of phonological theory. In particular it is concerned with the concepts of sameness and difference, each a sine qua non of classification. It is assumed that all academic disciplines operate with these two basic concepts when classification is involved. Since phonology is the area of linguistics that deals with the interface between the abstract system of native speaker knowledge and physical entities in the world, the linguistic classification of those physical entities needs to be guided by clear and rigorously applied criteria for deciding what constitutes the same sound and what not. During the development of modern linguistics over the past hundred years or so it has generally been assumed that the criteria for classification are to be found in a segmented version of the phonetic continuum of spoken language. This is still largely the case today, even though the system of native speaker knowledge of language is seen as a highly abstract mental representation of that knowledge. This book questions the basis of such assumptions, in particular segmentation, abstractness, monosystemicity and derivation.

Highlighting some interesting and intriguing aspects of English phonetics and phonology from a variety of perspectives, this book brings up a number of empirical questions in order to emphasize the necessity of taking a very broad view of what spoken English means in today's socio-cultural context. English has become a truly global means of communication, used as a first, second, or additional language by millions and millions of diverse speakers, in a multitude of different communicative contexts, so that the very notions of native and non-native seem to have changed profoundly, as have the notions of central/ peripheral and standard/ non-standard with regard to English varieties spoken around the globe. Therefore, today more than ever before, in studying English phonetics many small research steps need to be taken to provide diverse and broad empirical data from as many different standpoints as possible. This collection indeed looks at English phonetics from a wide spectrum of perspectives, including those of native or EFL speakers, language varieties, L2 language teaching and learning, as well as language contact, development, and change.

This collection of papers focuses on the general theme of phonological strength, bringing together current work being undertaken in a variety of leading theoretical frameworks. Its aim is to show how referring directly to strength relations can facilitate explanation in different parts of the phonological grammar. The papers introduce illuminating data from a wide range of languages including English, Dutch, German, Greek, Japanese, Bambara, Yuhup, Nivkh, Sesotho and other Bantu systems, demonstrating how strength differences are central to the analysis of phonological patterning not only in well-documented cases of segmental asymmetry but also in other areas of description including language acquisition, pitch accent patterns and tonal phenomena. All of the contributors agree on the need for a phonological (as opposed to a phonetic) approach to the question of strength differences, and show how a strength-based analysis may proceed in various theoretical models including Dependency Phonology, Government Phonology, Strict CV Phonology and Optimality Theory. Many of the papers develop a structural account of their data, in which strength relations are understood to reflect asymmetric licensing relations holding between units in representations. The volume provides a snapshot of current thinking on the question of strength in phonology. The range of language data and theoretical contexts it explores give a clear indication that phonological strength acts as a common thread to unite a range of apparently unrelated patterns and processes.

A study of how humans weave the sound-patterns of language, informed by insights from linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience and genetics.

The Segment in Phonetics and Phonology unravels exactly what the segment is and on what levels it exists, approaching the study of the segment with theoretical, empirical, and methodological heterogeneity as its guiding principle. A deliberately eclectic approach to the study of the segment that investigates exactly what the segment is and on what level it exists Includes new research data from a diverse range of fields such as experimental psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and mathematical theories of communication Represents the major theoretical models of phonology, including Articulatory Phonology, Optimality Theory, Laboratory Phonology and Generative Phonology Examines both well-studied languages like English, Chinese, and Japanese and under-studied languages such as Southern Sierra Miwok, Päri, and American Sign Language

Generative phonology aims to formalise two distinct aspects of phonological processes: the functional and the representational. Since functions operate on representations, it is clear that the functional aspect is influenced by the form of representations, i.e. different types of representation require different types of rules, principles or constraints. This volume examines the representational issue in phonology and considers what kind of representation is most appropriate for recent models of generative phonology. In particular, it provides the first platform for debate on the place of morpheme-internal structure and on the formal status of phonology in the language faculty, and attempts to identify phonological recursive structure as a means of capturing frequently observed processes.

The papers included in the volume Phonetics and Phonology: Interactions and interrelations are concerned with some of the multiple possible forms of interactions and interrelations in phonetics and phonology: the phonetic and/or phonological nature of speech patterns, segmental and prosodic interactions, and interactions between segments and features, both in child and in adult language, combining perception and production data, and doing so from theoretically as well as experimentally oriented perspectives. The book is unique in the universe of recent publications for its topic, wide scope and coherent thematic content. It is of interest to all researchers, teachers and students in the fields of phonetics and phonology as well as to those interested in the interplay between production and perception, the organization of grammar and language typology. In general, Phonetics and Phonology. Interactions and interrelations may be a useful companion to all those wishing to widen and deepen their knowledge of the sound structure of language(s).

This book primarily provides a detailed description and interpretation of one of the most fascinating and poorly understood processes in English accentology, i.e. Aitken’s Law, also known as the Scottish Vowel Length Rule by which vowel quantity in Scottish English is fully predictable, as opposed to the other regional accents of English speakers. The research also contributes to the understanding of the working of long-short vowel distinctions in the languages of the world and argues that all phenomena observed in connection with the presence and absence vowel quantity contrasts are a direct consequence of the working of a relatively small set of universal and inviolable principles of grammar.