It is generally believed that Turkish stress is always word-final. Closer examination, however, reveals several types of exceptions to this pattern involving both roots and affixes. This paper proposes a unified analysis of regular and irregular stress in Turkish that crucially depends on our definition of the Phonological Word. In addition, we discuss stress in constituents beyond the word, and provide evidence for the Clitic Group as well as the Phonological Phrase. Finally, we also briefly discuss vowel harmony and a set of syllabification phenomena, and show how the latter, in particular, provide independent support for the proposal we advance here.

The widely attested onset/coda asymmetry involves a situation in which the inventory of phonemes in syllable-final position in a particular language is a subset of those which contrast in onsets. The inverse of this pattern has been claimed to never occur (Goldsmith 1990, Beckman 1998). However, this prediction is falsified by Chamicuro, a Peruvian language in which /h/ and /[glottal plosive]/ are systematically restricted to coda position. Since no permutation of all known constraints can account for this unusual distribution, a new constraint is necessary. I propose that we invoke HAVEPLACE and subcategorise it for onsets. This positional markedness filter permits placeless (laryngeal) consonants to surface in codas, but blocks them in onsets. A beneficial side-effect of this analysis is that it preserves the onset/coda asymmetry while allowing /[glottal plosive]/ and /h/ to be the only principled exceptions to it.

In this paper, we use articulatory measures to determine whether Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process or a concrete phonetic process depending on articulatory timing. We examine tongue position during /l/ before underlying schwa and epenthetic schwa and in coda position. We find greater tip raising before both types of schwa, indicating light /l/ before schwa and dark /l/ in coda position. We argue that the ability of epenthetic schwa to condition the /l/ alternation shows that Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process involving insertion of some unit, and cannot be accounted for within Articulatory Phonology.

Hammond's book is the volume on English in the series The Phonology of the World's Languages; and therein lies an inevitable problem. Writing a contribution for a series with as many definite articles as this one, and on English, which like it or not, and with no disrespect to the less attended-to languages of the world, has been the focus of quite disproportionate phonological attention, is for anyone a rather daunting task. This means that there is even more literature to review than usual in a book of this kind, and more controversies to be embroiled in; and in consequence, there will inevitably be restrictions in coverage. What matters, then, is that the author must set out what he intends to do, be consistent with that, and explain his choices in terms of those entirely inevitable restrictions. Although this book has many good points, it often seems that Hammond does not actually carry through his stated intentions, or justify the choices he has made as cogently as might be hoped.

It is generally acknowledged, by both its proponents and detractors, that Optimality Theory has provoked a reexamination, in recent years, of the role of functional considerations, and their typological reflexes, in phonological theory. April McMahon's Change, chance, and optimality attempts an in-depth examination of this issue, particularly from the perspective of the relation between synchrony and diachrony in linguistic theory. The issue, and OT's general stance towards it, are summarised by Prince & Smolensky (1993: 198):

One might feel compelled to view a grammar as a more-or-less arbitrary assortment of formal rules, where the principles that the rules subserve (the ‘laws’) are placed entirely outside the grammar, beyond the purview of formal or theoretical analysis, inert but admired. It is not unheard of to conduct phonology in this fashion. We urge a reassessment of this essentially formalist position. If phonology is separated from the principles of well-formedness (the ‘laws’) that drive it, the resulting loss of constraint and theoretical depth will mark as major defeat for the enterprise. The danger, therefore, lies in the other direction: clinging to a conception of Universal Grammar as little more than a loose organizing framework for grammars. A much stronger stance, in accord with the thrust of recent work, is available. When the scalar and the gradient are recognized and brought within the purview of theory, Universal Grammar can supply the very substance from which grammars are built: a set of highly general constraints which, through ranking, interact to produce the elaborate particularity of individual languages.

The phonology of Norwegian is the ninth book in the Oxford University Press series The Phonology of the World's Languages. With Kristoffersen's book, nearly half of this series is devoted to studies of Germanic languages, in which context his work supplements previous volumes on Dutch (Booij 1995), German (Wiese 1996) and English (Hammond 1999). The phonology of Norwegian fits comfortably into this series and the author has been successful in achieving his stated purpose of giving a thorough presentation of the phonological facts of Norwegian as well as offering analyses of many of those facts. The phonology of Norwegian can be seen as supplanting Kristoffersen (1991), the author's doctoral dissertation from the University of Tromsø, which has until this point arguably been the most comprehensive discussion of Norwegian phonology.

Acquisition and the lexicon collects revised versions of nineteen primary papers and four commentaries presented at the 5th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, held at Northwestern University in July 1996. It is not possible to do justice to each paper in a collection this large and diverse, so individual papers will be discussed as they relate to three themes that emerge from the book as a whole: (i) the relationship between phonology and speech processing – this volume contains more papers on speech processing than its predecessors in the Laboratory Phonology series, which brings to the forefront questions about the relationship between phonological theory and theories of speech processing; (ii) the phonetics–phonology divide – a number of the phonology papers question the common assumption that phonetics and phonology are separate components of grammar; (iii) frequency effects – results are presented showing effects of the frequency of words and other phonological units in a striking variety of domains.

The theory of reduplication developed in this book distinguishes itself from most recent work in reduplication in important ways. First of all, it adopts the Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994, Noyer 1997) and a derivational, rule-based approach to reduplication (and to phonology in general). It explicitly argues against parallel, surface-based models of prosodic morphology, like Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993, Prince & Smolensky 1993, etc.). Further, the analyses proposed in the book reject the proposal, current since McCarthy & Prince (1986), that the shape of reduplicative morphemes (like other fixed-shape morphemes) is constrained to be (roughly) equivalent to a prosodic constituent, syllable or foot. The book is organised as follows. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1 outlining the goals of the book, Chapter 2 introduces enough of the theory to show how backcopying in reduplication, argued since Wilbur (1973) to be impossible to account for without reference to reduplicative surface-identity effects, can be handled in a derivational framework. Chapter 3, the longest chapter, discusses the technical details of the theory in more detail and goes on to show how the fixed shape and unmarked featural and prosodic structure typical of reduplicative morphemes can be accounted for without reference to either prosodic structure or general markedness. The fourth and final chapter discusses in more detail theoretical issues raised in earlier chapters, like how this approach defines markedness of reduplication patterns and avoids reduplication-specific mechanisms. The review discusses each of these points in turn.

This book grew out of a 1997 workshop sponsored by Aditi Lahiri and her group at the University of Constance. It consists of eleven chapters and an introduction by Aditi Lahiri, the editor. The articles are focused largely on Germanic languages, although not entirely, as Bengali and Latin also receive detailed discussion. There is diversity in the range of topics covered in the volume – tonogenesis, stress, quantity changes, voicing alternations, allomorphy, paradigms and grammaticalisation are some of the major areas of phonology and morphology that are addressed. Authors adopt different theoretical frameworks, with Optimality Theory playing some role in many articles. Optimality Theory is assumed by some, argued against by others and modified by yet others.

This new addition to the series on the phonology of the world's languages edited by Jacques Durand is the most comprehensive study of the synchronic phonology of Standard Chinese (or Standard Mandarin) since the publication of Cheng's (1973) monograph. Duanmu provides a detailed description of the phonological facts in Standard Chinese (henceforth SC), some of which are new or little studied before, offers new perspectives on old problems and proposes a theoretical analysis of these facts in current frameworks such as feature geometry, metrical phonology and Optimality Theory. The main innovation and, in my opinion, the most significant contribution of this book is the extensive coverage of stress (or metrical structure) and its influence on the order and length of compound words. The role of metrical structure is also extended to the analysis of some long-standing problems of the well-known tone 3 sandhi process. Claiming the existence of stress and its importance to understanding the interaction of phonology and morphosyntax in SC may come as a surprise to some readers since SC is not a stress language and its phonetic stress is notoriously difficult to detect. The proposed metrical analysis, nonetheless, is innovative and convincingly argued, and has clearly established the phonological relevance of metrical structure for SC.