Phonology: Critical Concepts, the first such anthology to appear in thirty years and the largest ever published, brings together over a hundred previously published book chapters and articles from professional journals. These have been chosen for their importance in the exploration of theoretical questions, with some preference for essays that are not easily accessible.Divided into sections, each part is preceded by a brief introduction which aims to point out the problems addressed by the various articles and show their relations to one another.-

Evolutionary Phonology is a theory of sound patterns which synthesizes results in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonological theory. In this book, Juliette Blevins explores the nature of sounds patterns and sound change in human language over the past 7000–8000 years, the time depth for which the comparative method is reasonably reliable. This book presents an approach to the problem of how genetically unrelated languages, from families as far apart as Native American, Australian Aboriginal, Austronesian and Indo-European, can often show similar sound patterns, and also tackles the converse problem of why there are notable exceptions to most of the patterns that are often regarded as universal tendencies or constraints. It argues that in both cases, a formal model of sound change that integrates phonetic variation and patterns of misperception can account for attested sound systems without reference to markedness or naturalness within the synchronic grammar.

Murrinhpatha is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in a region of tropical savannah and tidal inlets on the north coast of the continent. Some 3000 speakers live mostly in the towns of Wadeye and Nganmarriyanga, though they maintain close ties to their traditional lands, totems and spirit ancestors. Murrinhpatha word structure is highly complex, and quite distinct from the better-known Pama-Nyungan languages of central and southern Australia. Murrinhpatha is characterised by prolific compounding, clitic clusters, cumulative inflection, irregular allomorphy and phonological assimilation. This book provides a comprehensive account of these phenomena, giving particular attention to questions of morphological constituency, lexical storage, and whether there is really such thing as a ‘word’ unit.

This volume brings together a number of ground-breaking papers in the theory of phonology.

The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language whose strongest cross-linguistic patterns are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure. Syllable patterns involving long sequences of consonants are both typologically rare and theoretically marginalized, with few approaches treating these as natural or unproblematic structures. This book is an investigation of the properties of languages with highly complex syllable patterns. The two aims are (i) to establish whether these languages share other linguistic features in common such that they constitute a distinct linguistic type, and (ii) to identify possible diachronic paths and natural mechanisms by which these patterns come about in the history of a language. These issues are investigated in a diversified sample of 100 languages, 25 of which have highly complex syllable patterns. Languages with highly complex syllable structure are characterized by a number of phonetic, phonological, and morphological features which serve to set them apart from languages with simpler syllable patterns. These include specific segmental and suprasegmental properties, a higher prevalence of vowel reduction processes with extreme outcomes, and higher average morpheme/word ratios. The results suggest that highly complex syllable structure is a linguistic type distinct from but sharing some characteristics with other proposed holistic phonological types, including stress-timed and consonantal languages. The results point to word stress and specific patterns of gestural organization as playing important roles in the diachronic development of these patterns out of simpler syllable structures.

This handbook makes available short grammatical sketches of Australian languages. Each grammar is written in a standard format, following guidelines provided by the editors, and includes a sample text and vocabulary text. The contributions to this volume are salvage studies, giving all the information that is available on four languages which are on the point of extinction, and an assessment of what linguistic impressions can be inferred from the scant material that is available on the extinct languages of Tasmania.

This handbook makes available short grammatical sketches of Australian languages. Each grammar is written in a standard format, following guidelines provided by the editors, and includes a sample text and vocabulary text. The contributions to this volume are salvage studies, giving all the information that is available on four languages which are on the point of extinction, and an assessment of what linguistic impressions can be inferred from the scant material that is available on the extinct languages of Tasmania.

The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The volume provides a thorough overview of Australian languages, including their linguistic structures, their genetic relationships, and issues of language maintenance and revitalisation. Australian English, Aboriginal English and other contact varieties are also discussed.

Based on fieldwork near Carnarvon, Jul.-Aug. 1967; Brief details of present location, informants, dialects; Phonemics (phoneme inventory, articulation, distribution), morpho-phonemics (morphophoneme inventory, isomorphic & nonisomorphic morphophonemes), word & sentence structure, nouns (pronouns, numerals, substantives, noun stem formatives, case inflection, noun deictic), verbs (5 classes, verb stem formatives, inflections, verb deictric), particles (interjections, coordinators, adverbials), enclitics (temporal, connective).