These days, most graduate students in linguistics in the United States are not regularly exposed to the theory of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (Kiparsky 1982, Mohanan 1986). This theory – and the issues we wrestled with in it – have been largely discarded from the curriculum, replaced by the technical questions and concerns of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993). Questions of stratal assignment, the Strict Cycle Condition and the like have been largely abandoned in favour of the minutiae of correspondence (McCarthy & Prince 1995) and sympathy (McCarthy 1999).

Features are standard in segmental analysis but have been less successfully applied to tone. Subtonal features have even been argued to be less satisfactory for the representation of African tone than tonal primitives such as H, M, L (Hyman 2010; Clements et al. 2010). I argue that the two-feature system of Yip (1980) and Pulleyblank (1986) offers a straightforward account of the tonology of Laal, an endangered, three-tone isolate of southern Chad – in particular properties of the Mid tone that are otherwise difficult to account for, namely the avoidance of complex patterns involving M, and a pervasive M-to-L lowering process, both straightforwardly analysed as subtonal assimilation. Other tonal operations in Laal are shown to involve full-tone behaviour, justifying a tone geometry à la Snider (1999, 2020) where subtonal features are linked to a Tonal Root Node, giving tones the ability to be either fully or partially active, just like segments.

This paper provides new evidence in support of the hypothesis that the syntax–prosody mapping of Intonational Phrases is flexible (Hamlaoui and Szendrői 2015). In the traditional ‘rigid’ approaches, Intonational Phrases are taken to map onto particular syntactic projections. In contrast, in the ‘flexible’ approach, the Intonational Phrase corresponds to the highest projection of the verb (HVP). Accordingly, the ‘flexible’ approach predicts that the HVP should also determine the size of Intonational Phrases in a language where the verb height depends on the utterance type. Our evidence comes from a language of this type, Iron Ossetic (East Iranian). First, we demonstrate that verbs in Iron Ossetic occupy different functional heads in different contexts. Then, based on novel prosodic data, we show that the HVP indeed directly determines the size of Intonational Phrases in clauses with narrow foci and negative indefinites. Additionally, in wh-questions, language-specific mapping constraints come into play.

This delightful book is a descriptive presentation of all aspects of Armenian word phonology.I thank Sharon Hargus and Sharon Inkelas for valuable comments. Although the author assumes a particular theoretical stance, this does not in any way detract from the descriptive value of the book (more on this point below, where it is suggested that the strong theoretical commitment of the author in fact adds to the book's strength, even for a reader who does not subscribe to the same theoretical view as the author).

The book is part of the series on the phonology of the world's languages edited by Jacques Durand, and it closely follows the format of the other books so far published in the series. It starts with a concise but thorough and interesting chapter on the history, dialectology and basic descriptive facts of Armenian phonology. The second chapter introduces Rules and Representations Theory, which Vaux uses in his detailed theoretical accounts of phonological phenomena in subsequent chapters. Probably aware that most potential readers of the book (whether they are primarily interested in Armenian or in phonological theory) are unlikely to share his theoretical views, Vaux is careful to explicitly state all steps of theoretical reasoning in his analyses throughout the book. As a result, I have found later chapters on specific phonological phenomena perfectly readable without referring back to the second chapter.

Hayes (1990) proposes the adoption of a new notation for representing hierarchical phonological structure, in response to a notational problem which he calls the DIPHTHONGISATION PARADOX. More generally, he seeks to find a replacement for the current method of depicting feature trees, which is not ideally suited to the clear expression of rules and derivations. While I am in complete agreement with this standpoint and fully support Hayes' assertion that certain ambiguities of interpretation have crept into the graphical conventions currently in widespread use, I nevertheless believe his proposal suffers from a number of problems. Once identified, these problems can be solved with further notational and formal refinements.

In this paper, I develop an analysis of the Italian syntax–prosody interface in Match Theory, revisiting three φ-diagnostics from previous work: word-final vowel deletion, stress retraction and final lengthening. I show that these processes sometimes diverge in their distribution, supporting the existence of two phrasal domains in Italian. These domains are analysed using prosodic recursion. I then develop a novel formulation of MatchXP, according to which only syntactic XPs with phonologically overt heads, whether lexical or functional, are visible to the syntax–prosody mapping. This formulation is argued to be superior to versions of MatchXP that only match lexical XPs or that attempt to match all XPs, at least in Italian, suggesting that implementation of syntax–prosody mapping constraints may be subject to cross-linguistic variation.

Roca & Johnson (R & J) are ambitious in their goals for A course in phonology (CP), now in its second printing.I would like to thank Dirk Elzinga and Sharon Hargus for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this review. I would also like to thank Iggy Roca for his thorough commentary on that earlier draft, although I realise that he will likely remain unsatisfied with the present version. The book, intended for beginners (p. xv), covers what the authors see as the outcome of 30 years of work in mainstream generative phonology, including the framework of Optimality Theory (OT), and strives to do so in a pedagogically sound fashion. CP contains 20 chapters, divided into three parts: Phonetics and phonology, Suprasegmental structure and Advanced theory. There is, in addition, an accompanying workbook by the same authors and publisher, A workbook in phonology (WP) (pp. x+144), which is designed to be employable with other textbooks or on its own.

The first influential linguistic research on natural sign languages of the deaf is contained in a monograph by Stokoe (1960).I would like to thank Harry van der Hulst for useful comments on this review. That work demonstrated that sign language (American Sign Language in this case) could be shown to have a level of structure that corresponds to the phonological level, in that it consists of a finite list of meaningless units that combine to form all the lexical items of the language. By substituting just one of these units with another, minimal pairs could be identified. Stokoe further categorised these units into three broad types: handshape, location and movement, a categorisation which has persisted in most subsequent work. The fact that this seminal work addressed phonology rather than any other level of linguistic structure is a significant one, precisely because the physical modality of transmission is so different from that of spoken language. Despite this fact, and despite the obvious iconicity of much of the lexicon, sign languages do in fact have an abstract submorphemic level of structure.

Since Stokoe's discovery, linguists have been trying to describe that structure, and to compare it with that of spoken languages, developing approaches which are more and more informed by theoretical work on phonology of spoken languages. Two inherent problems have challenged researchers in this field: (i) to pinpoint the similarities and differences between the phonology of spoken languages and that of sign languages; and (ii) to understand the mutual relevance of sign language phonology and general phonological theory. Brentari's book about the phonology of American Sign Language (ASL) is the most recent attempt to rise to these challenges.