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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.

This book is about the nature of expression in speech. It is a comprehensive exploration of how such expression is produced and understood, and of how the emotional content of spoken words may be analysed, modelled, tested, and synthesized. Listeners can interpret tone-of-voice, assess emotional pitch, and effortlessly detect the finest modulations of speaker attitude; yet these processes present almost intractable difficulties to the researchers seeking to identify and understand them. In seeking to explain the production and perception of emotive content, the book reviews the potential of biological and cognitive models. It examines how the features that make up the speech production and perception systems have been studied by biologists, psychologists, and linguists, and assesses how far biological, behavioural, and linguistic models generate hypotheses that provide insights into the nature of expressive speech.

This book essentially argues for the importance of word frequency as a factor in the analysis and explanation of language structure. In other words, the roles of words and other linguistic phenomena such as morphology, phonology, and syntax are highly influenced by low, medium, or high frequency with which they occur. The book includes three decades of influential research in one thematic source. It provides an introductory overview that traces the development of thinking on this important subject. The discussion covers word frequency in lexical diffusion, morphophonemics, lexical and morphological conditioning of alternations using Spanish verbs as example, rules and schemas in the development and use of the English past tense, morphological classes as natural categories, regular morphology and lexicon, sequentiality as the basis of constituent structure, and mechanisms of change in grammaticization.

This book presents a phenomenon-oriented survey of the ways in which phonology and morphology interact, including ways in which morphology, i.e. word formation, demonstrates sensitivity to phonological information and in which phonological patterns can be sensitive to morphology. Chapters focus on morphologically conditioned phonology, process morphology, prosodic templates, reduplication, infixation, phonology-morphology interleaving effects, prosodic-morphological mismatches, ineffability and other cases in which phonology interferes with morphology, and paradigmatic effects of morphology on phonology, and vice versa. The overview points out theoretical issues on which particular phenomena bear. These include the debate over item-based vs. realizational approaches to morphology, the question of whether cyclic effects can be subsumed under paradigmatic effects, whether reduplication is phonological copying or morphological doubling, whether infixation and suppletive allomorphy are phonologically optimizing, and more. The book is intended to be used in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses or to have as a reference for those pursuing individual topics in the phonology-morphology interface. The overarching aim of the book is to bring together, and connect in as many ways as possible, the large and diverse set of topics that fall under the umbrella of the phonology-morphology interface.

Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences—jointly referred to as Information Structure. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning have, in recent years, been developed in formal semantics and pragmatics. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody—stress, phrasing, and melody—and interpretation—felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. It presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. Büring explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research.

This book offers a comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages (Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish) which takes into account internal dialectal variation. The prosodic analysis of all nine languages has been couched in a common framework, the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the ToBI transcription system, and has been carried out by groups of well-known experts on the prosody of these languages. One of the two noteworthy aspects of the book is the common methodology used in each of the chapters, which was based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire. The elicited DCT data allow for an analysis of how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means (syntactic constructions, discourse particles) in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence-types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The second important aspect of the book is the fact that the ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language and on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages.

This book investigates the phenomenon of Morphological Length-Manipulation: processes of segment lengthening, shortening, deletion, and insertion that cannot be explained by phonological means but crucially rely on morpho-syntactic information. A unified theoretical account of these phenomena is presented and it is argued that Morphological Length-Manipulation is best analysed inside the framework termed ‘Prosodically Defective Morphemes’: if all possible Prosodically Defective Morpheme representations and their potential effects for the resulting surface structure are taken into account, instances of length-manipulating non-concatenative morphology and length-manipulating morpheme-specific phonology are predicted. The argumentation in this book is hence in line with the general claim that all morphology results from combination and that non-concatenative exponents are epiphenomenal and arise from affixation of autosegmental elements. Although this position has been defended various times for specific phenomena, it has rarely been discussed against the background of a broad typological survey. In contrast to most existing claims, the argumentation in this book is based on a representative data set for attested morphological length-manipulating patterns in the languages of the world that serves as basis for the theoretical arguments. It is argued that alternative accounts suffer from severe under- and overgeneration problems if they are tested against the full range of attested phenomena.

Exponence is the mapping of morphosyntactic structure to phonological representations, a research area which is not only the traditional bone of contention between phonology and morphology, but also approached in fundamentally diverse ways in different theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory and Distributed Morphology: by morphological rules carrying out complex phonological operations, highly abstract morphophonological representations, and/or by phonological constraints which are sensitive to morphological information. This volume presents a synopsis of the state-of-the-art in research on exponence, based on a novel conception: Every chapter systematically discusses a specific aspect of exponence from the point of view of current theoretical morphology, but also from a theoretical phonology perspective. Topics include nonconcatenative morphology, allomorphy, iconicity, dissimilation and truncation processes. Two detailed chapters formulate a new coherent research program for exponence which integrates the central insights of the last decades and provides important new challenges for years to come.

The essays in this volume address a core question about the structure of linguistic systems: how much access do grammatical components (syntax, morphology, and phonology) have to each other? Each essay argues in favor of a particular view of the interaction of these components. Each sheds light on the nature of locality domains for allomorph selection, the morphosyntactic properties of the targets of phonological exponence, and adjudicating between the competing theories of morphosyntax-phonology interaction. This volume incorporates insights from recent theoretical developments (e.g., Optimality Theory, Distributed Morphology) and insights made available to us by contemporary empirical methodologies (field work, experimental and corpus-based quantitative work).

This book presents a cross-linguistic study of the phenomenon of infixation, typically associated in English with words like nullim-bloody-possiblenull, and found in all the world's major linguistic families. Infixation is a central puzzle in prosodic morphology: the book explores its prosodic, phonological, and morphological characteristics; considers its diverse functions, and formulates a general theory to explain the rules and constraints by which it is governed. The book examines 154 infixation patterns from over a hundred languages, including examples from Asia, Europe, Africa, New Guinea, and South America. It compares the formal properties of different kinds of infix, explores the range of diachronic pathways that lead to them, and considers the processes by which they are acquired in first language learning. A central argument of the book concerns the idea that the typological tendencies of language may be traced back to its origins and to the mechanisms of language transmission. The book thus combines the history of infixation with an exploration of the role diachronic and functional factors play in synchronic argumentation: it is an exemplary instance of the holistic approach to linguistic explanation.

This volume showcases the current state of the art in phonologization research, bringing together work by leading scholars in sound change research from different disciplinary and scholarly traditions. The book investigates the progression of sound change from the perspectives of speech perception, speech production, phonology, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, computer science, statistics, and social and cognitive psychology. This volume highlights the fruitfulness of collaborative efforts among phonologists with specialists from neighboring disciplines seeking unified theoretical explanations for the origins of sound patterns in language, as well as seeking to move toward a new and improved synthesis of synchronic and diachronic phonology.

This book presents insights on the phonology-morphology interface. It discusses a wide range of central theoretical issues, including the role of paradigms in synchronic grammars, and does so in the context of a wide variety of languages including several non-Indo-European languages. Paradigm uniformity has a long tradition in pre-generative linguistics but until recently played a minor role in theoretical phonology. Optimality Theory has drawn renewed attention to paradigmatic effects, formalized by constraints comparing the surface pronunciation of morphologically related words. The ten chapters in this book illustrate how a wide range of exceptions to regular phonological processes can be explained in this fashion. The chapters address such important theoretical questions as: do paradigms have a morphological base? If so, how is it defined? Why do paradigmatic effects hold for only certain subsets of words? In which areas of the grammar are paradigmatic effects likely to be found? The book discusses new data from the synchronic grammars of a wide variety of unrelated languages, including: Modern Hebrew, Chimwiini and Jita (Bantu), Halkomelem (Salish), Hungarian, and Arabic.

This book presents a treatment of a long-standing problem of Proto–Indo–European and Italic philology: the development of the Proto–Indo–European voiced aspirates in the ancient languages of Italy. In so doing it tackles a central issue of historical linguistics: the plausibility of explanations for sound change. The book argues that the problem can be resolved by combining a traditional philological investigation with experimental phonetics. Philological methods enable the presentation of the first integrated account of the evidence for the Italic languages, with detailed discussion of languages other than Latin. Theory and methods from experimental phonetics are then adopted to offer a new explanation for how the sound change might have taken place. At the same time, phonetic methods also confirm the traditional reconstruction of voiced aspirates for Proto–Indo–European. Thus the book offers a case-study of the successful application of synchronic theory and method to a problem of diachrony.

Geminate consonants, also known as long consonants, appear in many languages in the world, and how they contrast with their short counterparts, or singletons (e.g. /tt/ vs. /t/), is an important topic that features in most linguistics and phonology textbooks. However, neither their phonetic manifestation nor their phonological nature is fully understood, much less their cross-linguistic similarities and differences. As the first volume specifically devoted to the phonetics and phonology of geminate consonants, this book aims to bring together novel, original data and analyses concerning many individual languages in different parts of the world, to present a wide range of perspectives for the study of phonological contrasts in general by introducing various experimental (acoustic, perceptual, physiological, and electrophysiological) and non-experimental methodologies, and to discuss phonological contrasts in a wider context than is generally considered by looking also at the behaviour of geminate consonants in loanword phonology and language acquisition. Studying geminate consonants requires interdisciplinary approaches including experimental phonetics (acoustics and speech perception), theoretical phonology, speech processing, neurolinguistics, and language acquisition. Providing phonetic and phonological details about geminate consonants across languages will greatly contribute to research in these fields.

This volume endeavors to bridge one of the gaps between linguistic theory and the biological sciences by presenting a comprehensive view of phonology which simultaneously addresses linguists and those who from other fields who would like to make contact with phonological theory. It proposes a new theory of phonological computation using representations and operations informed by a broader biolinguistic perspective, breaking the human language externalization system into component parts and investigating their possible origins in cognitive abilities found throughout the animal kingdom. Issues discussed include phonology in evolutionary perspective, the role of phonology within a Minimalist conception of the language faculty, phonological operations and representations, arguments for parallel cyclicity across linguistic modules, the order of operations at the syntax/phonology interface, diachronic phonology, the role of language acquisition in language change, and the sources of linguistic variation.

Although there is a rich history of research in linguistic typology, phonology has received relatively little attention in this literature compared to morphology and syntax. This book is the first linguistic typology book devoted to the field of phonology. Drawing on a combination of existing typologies and results of a survey of various phonological patterns in the 100-language WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures) sample, the book examines the cross-linguistic distribution of major phonological phenomena including phoneme inventories, syllable structure, segmental alternations, stress, tone, intonation, and prosodic morphology. Quantitative data from corpora of individual languages are also presented and compared with cross-linguistic patterns in order to assess the relationship between inter- and intralanguage frequency. These data are used to explore correlations between different (sometimes superficially unrelated) phonological properties to gain insight into the driving forces behind these phenomena. The book provides an overview of synchronic and diachronic explanations for the observed patterns and discussion of how formal phonological theory has attempted to model the typological data.

Bantu languages have played and continue to play an important role as a source of data illustrating core phonological processes—vowel harmony, nasal place assimilation, postnasal laryngeal alternations, tonal phenomena such as high tone spread and the OCP, prosodic morphology, and the phonology–syntax interface. Chichewa, in particular, has been a key language in the development of theoretical approaches to these phonological phenomena. This book provides thorough descriptive coverage, presented in a clear, atheoretical manner, of the full range of phonological phenomena of Chichewa. Less well-studied topics—such as positional asymmetries in the distribution of segments, the phonetics of tone, and intonation—are also included. The book surveys, where relevant, important recent theoretical approaches to phonological problems—such as vowel harmony, the phonology–syntax interface, focus prosody, and reduplication—where Chichewa data is routinely referred to in the theoretical literature. The book will therefore serve as a resource for phonologists—at all levels and working in different theoretical frameworks—who are interested in the processes discussed. Because many of the phonological processes in Chichewa are conditioned by particular morphological or syntactic contexts, the book should also be of interest to linguists working on the interfaces. As there are almost no other monographs on the phonology of Bantu languages available, this book serves as an excellent introduction to core issues in the phonology of Bantu languages.

The book presents a detailed comparative description of the phonological structure of Icelandic and Faroese and discusses problems in their analysis from a fairly broad theoretical perspective. The first part (Chapters 1–3) describes the historical relation between the languages and introduces some issues regarding their phonological analysis. Part II (Chapters 4–7) gives an overview of the segmental inventory of the two sound systems. Part III (Chapters 8–10) presents analyses of the syllable structure of the two languages and systemic relations between subsystems defined for different phonotactic positions. It also treats the rules for the distribution of long and short vowel nuclei. Part IV (Chapters 11–12) describes vocalic and consonantal morphophonemics, discussing the status, in inflectional paradigms and word formation, of umlaut and ablaut alternations and patterns such as those responsible for the distribution of preaspiration. Part V gives an overview of rhythmic relations in words and phrases in the two languages, ending with descriptions of intonational patterns in the two languages.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of the phonology of Japanese, based on Japanese and Western materials and the author’s original research. It provides a rich source of materials and critical discussion of some current problems, reviewing previously published analyses and proposing solutions. Focussing on modern standard (Tôkyô) Japanese, with occasional excurses into major dialectical variations and historical backgrounds, the book offers both a critical synthesis of Japanese phonology and new analyses on some of its central features. Starting with the vowel inventory, the phonology of high vowel devoicing, insertion and elision, prosodic lengthening and shortening, and the status of diphthongs, it moves to the consonant system and the phonology of voicing, and to the so-called moraic segments. The chapter dedicated to the prosodic units provides a detailed and original analysis of the relation between the mora and syllable, one of the key issue of Japanese phonology, not to forget the foot and the prosodic word. It argues that the mora and the foot are sufficient for the comprehension and analysis of the phonology of Japanese. The final and longest chapter is devoted to accent, through descriptions and analyses of simplex and compound noun accentuation, default accentuation, the underlying accent of Sino-Japanese morphemes and that of numeral compounds to name just a few. It also addresses the question of the typological status of the Japanese accent in relation to tone.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of Swedish phonology. There are two chapters on respectively vowels and consonants, describing the alternations and distributions of allophones and providing new, motivated phonemic charts. The rules and processes that are primarily segmental in nature are collected in one chapter, which includes both fully productive processes, and partly petrified ones. Among the most interesting segmental processes are the sandhi process of retroflexion, where interaction of several conditioning factors (quantity, morphology, phonation) accounts for the distribution, and the rule of d-continuization whereby a /d/ is realized as [r] in words that lack phonological stress. Most previous interest in Swedish phonology concerns the prosodic level and several chapters are devoted to an account for the interaction of stress, tone, prosodic structure and morphological structure. The minimal prosodic word is shown to be the domain of syllabification, of culminativity by stress, and of the assignment of a lexical tone from suffix to primary stress. Unlike English, Swedish only admits one stress per minimal prosodic word. Moreover, Swedish stress information is largely specified in morphemes (as stressed, or as subcategorizing for a stress). Together with a phonological stress rule, these factors greatly constrain word formation in Swedish, as well as account for the rather spectacular process of nickname formation. The argument for this organization of things is extensively laid out in two chapters focussing on the stress and accent distribution, respectively. Another chapter lays out the quantity system of Swedish, where stressed syllables must be heavy, but by virtue of containing either a long vowel or a long consonant. There is a chapter on the orthographic representation and comments on orthography are also given in the chapters on vowels and consonants. The book aims at providing new analyses where motivated, but at the same time endeavours not to be too theory dependent in presentation.