The German uvular /R/ probably shows more surface variation than any other segment in the language. (1) illustrates that /R/ has a vocalic allophone [A], which can surface either as a glide or a vowel, a sonorant consonant allophone, which is pronounced as a uvular trill or approximant, and two obstruent allophones:

In the present study I focus on the rules producing the consonantal allophones of /R/ in both Standard German and in certain dialects of the Lower Rhineland (henceforth LRG).

To address the claim that listener misperceptions are a source of phonological shifts in nasal vowel height, the phonological, acoustic and perceptual effects of nasalisation on vowel height were examined. We show that the acoustic consequences of nasal coupling, while consistent with phonological patterns of nasal vowel raising and lowering, do not always influence perceived vowel height. The perceptual data suggest that nasalisation affects perceived vowel height only when nasalisation is phonetically inappropriate (e.g. insufficient or excessive nasal coupling) or phonologically inappropriate (e.g. no conditioning environment in a language without distinctive nasal vowels). It is argued that these conditions, rather than the inherent inability of the listener to distinguish the spectral effects of velic and tongue body gestures, lead to perceptual misinterpretations and potentially to sound change.

This paper argues that processes traditionally classified as lenition fall into at least two subsets, with distinct phonetic reflexes, formal properties and characteristic contexts. One type, referred to as loss lenition, frequently neutralises contrasts in positions where they are perceptually indistinct. The second type, referred to as continuity lenition, can target segments in perceptually robust positions, increases the intensity and/or decreases the duration of those segments, and very rarely results in positional neutralisation of contrasts. While loss lenition behaves much like other phonological processes, analysing continuity lenition is difficult or impossible in standard phonological approaches. The paper develops a phonetically based optimality-theoretic account that explains the typology of the two types of lenition. The crucial proposal is that, unlike loss lenition, continuity lenition is driven by constraints that reference multiple prosodic positions.

The purpose of evidence adduced in support of a theory is not to prove that theory true but to demonstrate that competing theories account for facts less well and thus no longer demand our attention. Evidence therefore, if it can unambiguously decide between competing theories, helps the discipline to spend its resources on only a few issues at a time. I evaluate this winnowing capacity of various kinds of evidence which have been offered in support of hypotheses on what knowledge native speakers' have about the sound patterns in their language and how they use it: surface sound patterns, sound change, poetry, speech errors, word games, and experiments. I argue that experiments provide evidence of the highest quality. Four experiments are reported, three psychological and one phonetic, which offer evidence on the following claims: (a) the psychological basis of speakers' awareness of phonotactics, (b) speakers' awareness of the morphemic constituents of complex derived words, (c) whether epenthetic stops of the sort evident in words like team[p]ster are added by purely mechanical constraints of the articulatory apparatus or whether they can be attributed to higher, pre-phonetic levels, and (d) the factors that determine speakers' assignment of allophones to phonemes.

In a detailed comparison of the intonational systems of two unrelated languages, Israeli Sign Language and American Sign Language, we show certain similarities as well as differences in the distribution of several articulations of different parts of the face and motions of the head. Differences between the two languages are explained on the basis of pragmatic notions related to information structure, such as accessibility and contingency, providing novel evidence that the system is inherently intonational, and only indirectly related to syntax. The study also identifies specific ways in which the physical modality in which language is expressed influences intonational structure.

In this paper I consider the behaviour of word-internal empty nuclei preceded by a consonant cluster. I provide a principled account for the fact that in this context a properly governable empty nucleus receives a phonetic interpretation. To do so I introduce a new notion: GOVERNMENT-LICENSING. I argue that a non-nuclear head can govern a complement only if (i) it has the required charm value, or if charmless, the required complexity, and (ii) it is licensed to govern by a following nuclear head. Among other things government-licensing accounts for the phonetic realisation of an empty nucleus following a governing onset head (i.e. a non-nuclear skeletal point which governs a rhymal or an onset complement), and for the simplification of a consonant cluster preceding an unrealised empty nucleus. If, in order to govern a complement, a nonnuclear point must be government-licensed and if a properly governed empty nucleus may not be such a licenser, in a situation where a properly governable empty nucleus follows a consonant cluster we predict the two following possibilities: to license the consonant to govern, the empty nucleus will fail to be properly governed, or proper government will apply, preventing the non-nuclear head from governing its complement, which entails the loss of this head.

In early autosegmental studies certain segments were specially marked with a ‘star’ diacritic. These starred segments had a priority association; only in a later stage of the derivation were other segments associated. Starred associations were resistant to modification by subsequent rules: ‘the point is to preserve the prominence of the star’ (Goldsmith 1979: 129). An associated tone had as its phonetic exponent a high or low pitch occurring approximately at the same time as the associated item(s) on the phoneme tier, usually a vowel.

In this paper, I present an analysis of the typology of laryngeal co-occurrence restrictions based on contrast markedness. The key ingredient of the analysis, for which I provide experimental support, is that laryngeal co-occurrence phenomena reflect a preference for maximising the perceptual distinctness of contrasts between words (Flemming 1995, 2004). An AX discrimination task finds that the contrast between an ejective and a plain stop is less accurately perceived in the context of another ejective in the word than in the context of another plain stop in the word. Pairs of words like [k'ap'i] and [k'api], which contrast 2 vs. 1 ejectives, are less reliably distinguished than pairs of words like [kap'i] and [kapi], which contrast 1 vs. 0 ejectives. The unifying factor of all laryngeal co-occurrence patterns is the neutralisation of the contrast between words with one and two laryngeally marked segments, exactly the contrast that is shown to be relatively perceptually weak.

This paper investigates the word-prosodic system of the Curaçao dialect of Papiamentu. Curaçao Papiamentu has both lexically distinctive stress and, independently, a word-level tone contrast. On the basis of a detailed acoustic investigation of this tonal contrast, we propose a privative phonological interpretation of the tone contrast, similar to proposals for the Scandinavian word-accent systems (Riad 1998, to appear). As compared to previous treatments of Curaçao Papiamentu word prosody, our hypothesis makes crucial reference to intonation and to tonal underspecification. We also investigate the realisation of primary and secondary stress in Curaçao Papiamentu.

This paper proposes a model of stress assignment in which metrical structure is built serially, one foot at a time, in a series of Optimality Theory (OT)-style evaluations. Iterative foot optimisation is made possible in the framework of Harmonic Serialism, which defines the path from an input to an output with a series of gradual changes in which each form improves harmony relative to a constraint ranking. Iterative foot optimisation makes the strong prediction that decisions about metrical structure are made locally, matching attested typology, while the standard theory of stress in parallel OT predicts in addition to local systems unattested stress systems with non-local interactions. The predictions of iterative foot optimisation and parallel OT are compared, focusing on the interactions of metrical parsing with syllable weight, vowel shortening and constraints on the edges of prosodic domains.

The intonation contour of a Papago sentence is entirely predictable on the basis of its surface syntactic structure. It consists of a sequence of instances of the pattern (L)HL. For example, one Papago sentence may manifest a single (L)HL pattern, as in (I):

while another will show repetitions of the canonical tonal shape, as in (2):

Our task in this paper will be to characterise the distribution of the (L)HL pattern in Papago sentences. Our analysis is that the phonological representation of a sentence of Papago consists of a sequence of one or more tonal phrases, and that (L)HL is the pattern assigned to a tonal phrase. This tonal phrasing - i.e. the beginnings and ends of individual tonal phrases - will be indicated by parentheses in the tonal tier, as in (1) and (2). The association of the (L)HL pattern within each tonal phrase is captured by simple rules of the phonology, to be described in §2. Thus the description of the syntax of Papago intonation contours will centre on the tonal phrasing itself, and on the manner in which it is determined with respect to surface syntactic structure.

This article investigates the role of the syllable in the phonology of English. In particular, it centres on the problem of shortening and ambisyllabicity. The latter has sometimes been equated with resyllabification (Borowsky 1986; Myers 1987). In this view, ambisyllabicity is a phonetic phenomenon and it is resyllabification that plays a role in phonology. We demonstrate that shortening and ambisyllabicity/resyllabification are, counter to the currently held belief, entirely independent of each other, even though quantity-related processes (shortening and lengthening) are set in syllabic terms.

This study continues the general line of generative research on English begun originally by Chomsky & Halle (1968, hereafter SPE) and developed in a number of later contributions, notably by Rubach (1984), Halle & Mohanan (1985), Myers (1987) and Yip (1987). Attention is focused on the latter two papers. The interpretations presented in these papers are revised and expanded in a number of substantial ways. The database has been broadened to cover the facts of British English, in particular Received Pronunciation (RP), as reported in the standard sources, such as Gimson (1970), Jones (1972), Jones & Gimson (1977) and Harris (1994). While in most cases the choice of the dialect of English plays no role, there are some rules and facts that refer exclusively to RP (Schwa Insertion, Tapping, the distribution of [I]/[ə]). For the sake of consistency, all the transcriptions cited in this article are drawn from RP.

The presentation is organised as follows. § 1 introduces the problem of shortening. §2 presents a complete list of the relevant classes of data and a partial critique of the analyses by Yip (1987) and Myers (1987).

Certain kinds of complex phenomena serve as testing and proving grounds in phonology as theories develop and change. Cases of what I will call CONFLICTING DIRECTIONALITY, exemplified by the stress pattern in Selkup (Ostyak-Samoyed) in (1), constitute one such phenomenon (Halle & Clements 1983, Idsardi 1992). This pattern, first discussed for Eastern Cheremis by Kiparsky (1973) (from Itkonen 1955), has informed all major theories of stress (Hayes 1981, 1995, Prince 1983, Halle & Vergnaud 1987, Kenstowicz 1995, Halle & Idsardi 1995, among others). Descriptively, in Selkup the rightmost heavy (CVV) syllable receives the stress (1a), but if the word contains no heavy syllables, it is the leftmost syllable which is stressed (1b). The term CONFLICTING DIRECTIONALITY describes this elsewhere relationship between the right and left edges of a word. No theory of stress is complete if it cannot account for this pattern.

The canonical image of vowel harmony is of a particular feature distributed throughout a word, leading to symmetric constraints like AGREE or SPREAD. Examination of the distribution of tongue-root advancement in Kinande demonstrates that harmonic feature distribution is asymmetric. The data argue that a formal (yet asymmetric) constraint (like ALIGN) is exactly half right: such a constraint correctly characterises the left edge of the harmonic domain. By contrast, the right edge is necessarily characterised by phonetically grounded restrictions on feature co-occurrence. Of further interest is the role of morphological domains: the interaction between domain restrictions on specific constraints and unrestricted constraints suggests a formal means of characterising the overwhelming similarity between constraint hierarchies at different morphological levels while at the same time characterising the distinctions between levels.

One of the major attributes of autosegmental phonology is the possibility ofreducing procedural techniques of morphological exponence to a generalisedconcept of concatenation. This research programme, which equates the triggers ofnon-concatenative processes with affixes consisting of incomplete autosegmentalor prosodic representations, is called Generalised Non-linear Affixation inBermúdez-Otero (2012). In this paper, we argue that the GeneralisedNon-linear Affixation analysis of segmental lengthening by mora affixationextends naturally to subtractive morphology. Defective (phoneticallyuninterpretable) integration of an affix mora into the prosodic structure of itsbase triggers deletion and shortening. We show that this approach derives allmajor types of quantity-manipulating morphology (vowel shortening, segmentalsubtraction and vowel-length polarity), and thus demonstrate that GeneralisedNon-linear Affixation extends fully to subtractive morphology, which has beenseen as the ultimate problem for a concatenative reanalysis (Anderson 1992).

This paper provides a detailed diachronic account of the adaptation of the English posterior coronal obstruents /ʃ ʧ ʤ/ in Contemporary Korean. These consonants are variably adapted with a glide (/j/ or /w/), and the distribution of the glides is conditioned by phonetic and phonological characteristics of the English input, as well as native phonotactic restrictions. The diachronic change in the occurrence of /w/ serves as an example of a variable phonetic detail in the input that is faithfully represented in loans in earlier stages, but which is subsequently eliminated in the emerging norm. Given this data, I propose how what, on the surface, may appear to be a ‘phonological’ adaptation can arise through regularisation of what is essentially a ‘phonetic’ adaptation. This study highlights the complexity of loanword adaptation and the importance of examining all of the different factors shaping this process.

Kimatuumbi, a Bantu language of Tanzania, has a number of phonological rules applying between words which are sensitive to syntactic structure. Kimatuumbi thus presents a test for theories of the interaction between syntactic structure and phonology. I argue that phonological rules in Kimatuumbi make direct reference to labelled surface syntactic bracketing, contrary to the claims of boundary theories such as Chomsky & Halle (1968) and Selkirk (1974), as well as the prosodic theories of Selkirk (1980), Nespor & Vogel (1982) and Hayes (1984).

Perhaps the most important insight in phonological theory since the introduction of the concept of the phoneme has been the role that distinctive features play in phonological theory (Jakobson et al. 1952). Most research since Jakobson's early formulation has focused on the segmental properties of these features without reference to their hierarchical organisation. Recent research, however, has shed considerable light on this latter aspect of the phoneme as a phonological unit. In his seminal article ‘The geometry of phonological features’, for example, Clements (1985), building on earlier work of scholars such as Goldsmith (1976), argues that features are not ‘bundles’ in Bloomfield's sense, but are, in fact, organised into phonological trees with each branch corresponding to what has been called a tier. An overview of the current state of feature geometry can be found in Clements & Hume (forthcoming) and Kenstowicz (1994).

This paper establishes that unbounded circumambient processes, phonological processes for which crucial information in the environment may appear unboundedly far away on both sides of a target, are common in tonal phonology, but rare in segmental phonology. It then argues that this typological asymmetry is best characterised by positing that tone is more computationally complex than segmental phonology. The evidence for the asymmetry is based around attestations of unbounded tonal plateauing, but it is also shown how the ‘sour-grapes’ harmony pathology is unbounded circumambient. The paper argues that such processes are not weakly deterministic, which contrasts with previous typological work on segmental phonology. Positing that weak determinism bounds segmental phonology but not tonal phonology thus captures the typological asymmetry. It is also discussed why this explanation is superior to any offered by Optimality Theory.

This work evaluates an argument recently made in these pages by Kabak & Vogel (2001) to the effect that the analysis of Turkish which they develop is superior on theoretical grounds to that of past accounts. Kabak & Vogel explicitly contrast their account to that offered in two recent, comprehensive discussions of Turkish stress by Inkelas & Orgun (1998) and Inkelas (1999). Careful consideration of the data discussed by Kabak & Vogel and by Inkelas & Orgun, as well as some additional data introduced in this paper, shows that the original Inkelas & Orgun analysis achieves greater empirical coverage while using less theoretical machinery.