In all human languages, we find words that are similar in some respect or another – usually because they are morphologically related. If speakers wish to determine the degree of similarity between two morphologically related forms, they must decide which elements to compare. Perhaps the most intuitive approach would be to compare the segments, and determine the degree of featural similarity they display. This approach might be thought of as ‘segmental comparison’. A schematic representation for two forms undergoing segmental comparison is given below.

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An equally plausible although less intuitive alternative is also available – prosodic elements could be compared. For example, the most prominent syllable node of each form might be compared, or the main-stressed nucleus of each form might be compared. This approach might be called ‘prosodic comparison’. Importantly, prosodic comparison might result in the comparison of elements that are associated with very different segmental melodies – for example, imagine a pair of words in which a given prosodic role (for example, head of prosodic word) has a different location in each form. Such a situation might occur in a language where stress shifts under affixation; in such a case, the linear order of segments would remain the same in both words, but the location of the prosodic heads would differ. A schematic representation of this sort of situation is given below.

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In this paper, I will consider just such a language – the Saipanese dialect of Chamorro – and demonstrate that the phonology of this language requires both segmental and prosodic comparison. This characteristic of the sound pattern of Chamorro holds great significance for theories which attempt to formalise phonological similarity effects, such as Steriade's (1996) theory of Paradigm Uniformity, Kenstowicz's (1995) theory of Uniform Exponence and McCarthy & Prince's theory of Correspondence (McCarthy & Prince 1993, 1994, 1995, McCarthy 1995). For simplicity of exposition, from this point on my analysis will be cast in terms of the theoretical framework of correspondence (discussed below). It should be remembered, however, that the main result of this analysis – the existence of prosodic phonological comparison – is relevant to any theory which seeks to give a comprehensive treatment of phonological similarity effects.

Georgian, a South Caucasian language belonging to the Kartvelian family, is characterised by the ability of its consonants to combine in extensive clusters. Among the possible combinations are a series of two-member clusters which are argued to behave phonologically as single segments (Tschenkeli 1958, Vogt 1958, 1971, Aronson 1982, 1991, Deprez 1988 and others). They are known as ‘harmonic’ clusters, because the laryngeal quality is constant across the cluster. Its two members are both voiced ([dg bg dγ bγ]), both aspirated ([thkh tshkh thχ tshχ]) or both ejective ([t'k' ts'k' p'k' t'q' ts'q']). They can occur either word-initially or in word-medial position. Harmonic clusters do not contrast with identical sequences of segments, except for sequences formed at the junction of two words. There is no evidence that across word boundaries harmonic clusters are derived by some sort of restructuring.

The purpose of the present study is to review the phonological arguments brought in the literature in favour of treating harmonic clusters as single segments, and to look for acoustic evidence that would motivate the distinction made between harmonic clusters behaving as single segments, on the one hand, and simple sequences of consonants, on the other hand. The study uses phonetic data to address the issue of phonological representation. If the difference between a harmonic cluster and a simple sequence of segments is present in the phonology, then it should ideally also be visible in the acoustic signal, for example in the presence or absence of a release burst, or in timing differences, as suggested by previous studies of complex vs. simple segments in various languages (Maddieson & Ladefoged 1989, Maddieson 1989, 1990). The results show that the treatment of Georgian harmonic clusters as complex segments is not supported by the acoustic data.

The paper is organised as follows: § 2 presents the phonological behaviour of consonant clusters in Georgian, § 3 reviews phonetic evidence for complex segments, and spells out the predictions made by the present study. The acoustic study is described in § 4, followed by the presentation and discussion of results in § 5. The conclusions and areas for further study are presented in § 6.

Local consonant–vowel (C–V) interaction is attested in many languages, both as a phonetic and as a phonological process. There can be a clear developmental relationship between the two, with phonologisation of phonetic interaction occurring quite commonly (Hyman 1976, Ohala 1981). Thus, a common (historical) context for nasal vowels is an adjacent nasal consonant. When consonants trigger non-local effects (i.e. when the domain of the consonantal feature extends beyond adjacent segments), typically both vowels and consonants are targeted. For example, in consonant-induced nasal or emphasis harmony all segments in the harmony domain usually take the consonantal feature. If some segments are neutral, targets still include both consonants and vowels.

Developments in phonological theory have led to the recognition that phonological representations have a layered constituent structure. Many, perhaps all, of these constituents contain elements which can be identified as heads. Heads enter into various kinds of relations with their dependents. In this article, we identify a phenomenon which is quite pervasive in every part of phonology which has heads and dependents, namely, the existence of head–dependent asymmetries (henceforth HDAs). While various particular manifestations of these asymmetries are well known and have been much studied, this is the first attempt, to our knowledge, to unite a broad range of seemingly different phenomena under one heading. We identify various types of HDAs, and propose constraints on possible HDAs.

Most importantly, we distinguish between HDAs that involve complexity, and those that involve visibility. These have properties which potentially contradict each other. We propose that they apply in fundamentally different types of cases: unlike complexity HDAs, visibility HDAs are limited to mappings from one phonological plane to another, and so are related to the notion of projection (cf. Vergnaud 1977).

We also wish to show that an understanding of HDAs reveals general structural principles that play a role in diverse phenomena at various levels of the phonological hierarchy. For example, the fact noted in the Optimality Theory literature that certain positions tend to be more ‘faithful’ to underlying specifications (Beckman 1998) is a consequence of the fact that heads allow more complexity. These principles act as constraints on possible constraints, and on possible mappings from one plane to another.

The present study proposes a new interpretation of the underlying distortion in APRAXIA OF SPEECH. Apraxia of speech, in its pure form, is the only neurolinguistic syndrome for which it can be argued that phonological structure is selectively distorted.

Apraxia of speech is a nosological entity in its own right which co-occurs with aphasia only occasionally. This…conviction rests on detailed descriptions of patients who have a severe and lasting disorder of speech production in the absence of any significant impairment of speech comprehension, reading or writing as well as of any significant paralysis or weakness of the speech musculature.

(Lebrun 1990: 380)

Based on the experimental investigation of poorly coarticulated speech of patients from two divergent languages (German and Xhosa) it is argued that apraxia of speech has to be seen as a defective implementation of phonological representations at the phonology–phonetics interface. We contend that phonological structure exhibits neither a homogeneously auditory pattern nor a motor pattern, but a complex encoding of sequences of speech sounds. Specifically, it is maintained that speech is encoded in the brain as a sequence of distinctive feature configurations. These configurations are specified with differing degrees of detail depending on the role the speech segments they underlie play in the phonological structure of a language. The transfer between phonological and phonetic representation encodes speech sounds as a sequence of vocal tract configurations. Like the distinctive feature representation, these configurations may be more or less specified. We argue that the severe and lasting disorders in speech production observed in apraxia of speech are caused by the distortion of this transfer between phonological and phonetic representation. The characteristic production deficits of apraxic patients are explained in terms of overspecification of phonetic representations.

The issue of vowel height harmony – relatively rare in the world's languages – is one that most serious theories of phonology have addressed at one time or another, particularly as concerns its realisation in Bantu (e.g. Clements 1991, Archangeli & Pulleyblank 1994, Beckman 1997). As is quite well known, the majority of an estimated 500 Bantu languages exhibit some variant of a progressive harmony process by which vowels lower when preceded by an appropriate (lower) trigger. (Ki)-Yaka, a Western Bantu language spoken in ex-Zaire, designated as H.31 by Guthrie (1967–71), has a height harmony system which has been analysed as having a similar left-to-right lowering process. In this paper I argue against the general analysis given for Yaka, showing that this language differs in a major way from the rest of Bantu. The goals of the paper are threefold. First, I present a comprehensive treatment of the unusual vowel harmony system in (ki-)Yaka. Second, I introduce the notion of the ‘prosodic trough’ (τ), a domain which is needed in order to state important phonological generalisations in Yaka and in Bantu in general. Finally, I show the relevance of the Yaka facts for the study of positional prominence in phonology. A (partial) analysis is offered within optimality- theoretic terms, particularly as developed by McCarthy & Prince (1995). Although superficially resembling the vowel height harmony found in most Bantu languages, the Yaka system will be shown to differ from these latter in major ways. The paper is organised as follows. In §2 I establish the general nature of the Yaka harmony system, reanalysing previous accounts in terms of ‘plateauing’. In §3 I turn to the process of ‘imbrication’, which introduces a second motivation for vowel harmony: the avoidance of the sequence [wi]. A third source of vowel harmony is presented in §4, which also introduces the notion of the ‘prosodic trough’. The study ends with a brief conclusion in §5 and an appendix that discusses outstanding problems.

A universal characteristic of speech is that utterances are generally broken down phonologically into smaller phrases which are marked by suprasegmental features such as intonational events and/or final lengthening. Moreover, phrases can be further divided into smaller-sized constituents. These constituents of varying size, or ‘prosodic units’, are typically characterised as performing the dual function of marking a unit of information and forming the domain of application of phonological rules. However, there is less agreement about how prosodic units are defined in generating an utterance. There are at least two different approaches (for a general review, see Shattuck-Hufnagel & Turk 1996). One approach posits that prosodic constituents are hierarchically organised and that prosodic constituents larger than a word are derived indirectly from the syntactic structure by referring to the edge of a maximal projection (Selkirk 1986), to the head–complement relation (Nespor & Vogel 1986) or to the c-command relation (Hayes 1989). This position, which I call the SYNTACTIC APPROACH, has been called the Prosodic Hierarchy theory, Prosodic Phonology or the Indirect Syntactic Approach (Selkirk 1984, 1986, Nespor & Vogel 1986, Hayes 1989).

The other position, which I call the INTONATIONAL APPROACH, also assumes a hierarchical prosodic structure, but defines the prosodic units larger than a word based on the surface phonetic form of an utterance by looking at suprasegmental features such as intonation and final lengthening (e.g. Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986, Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988, Jun 1993, Beckman 1996). Both approaches assume a prosodic hierarchy in which prosodic units are hierarchically organised and obey the Strict Layer Hypothesis (Selkirk 1984, 1986, Nespor & Vogel 1986; a prosodic unit of a given level of the hierarchy is composed of one or more units of the immediately lower prosodic unit, and is exhaustively contained in the superordinate unit of which it is a part). The prosodic units which are higher than a word, and which are commonly assumed by proponents of the syntactic approach, are the Phonological Phrase and the Intonation Phrase, while those assumed by the intonational approach are the Accentual Phrase, the Intermediate Phrase and the Intonation Phrase. The prosodic units below the Phonological Phrase, i.e. the Syllable, Foot and Prosodic Word, do not differ much in the two approaches, since these units have more fixed roles vis-à-vis syntax or intonation.

The intonational unit corresponding to the Phonological Phrase is the Intermediate Phrase in English (Beckman & Pierrehumbert 1986) or the Accentual Phrase in Korean (Jun 1993), in that these are the units immediately higher than a Word. The Phonological Phrase is defined based on the syntactic structure, but the intonational units are defined by intonational markers. The Intermediate Phrase in English is the domain of downstep, and is delimited by a phrase accent, H- or L-; the Accentual Phrase in standard (Seoul) Korean is demarcated by a phrase-final High tone. The next higher level, the Intonation Phrase, is much more similar in the two approaches. Even though the proponents of the syntactic approach define this level in terms of syntax (e.g. a sister node of a root sentence), they claim that this level is the domain of the intonational contour and is sensitive to semantic factors (Selkirk 1980, 1984, 1986, Nespor & Vogel 1986). In this paper, we will focus on the prosodic level corresponding to the Phonological Phrase.

In de Chene & Anderson's (1979) article on compensatory lengthening, the authors make two strong claims as to the universal nature of compensatory lengthening. These claims are: (i) that compensatory lengthening occurs in two stages, involving the weakening of a consonant to a glide and the subsequent merger of the resulting diphthong; and (ii) that compensatory lengthening can only occur when there is a pre-existing vowel-length contrast in the language in question.

Both of these claims have received considerable attention in the literature. The first claim has never gained widespread acceptance, and has been challenged in several studies. Challenges have come from, for example, Hock (1986), Poser (1986), Sezer (1986) and more recently Gildea (1995). Each of these scholars provides a strong case against the view that compensatory lengthening is always decomposable into two distinct stages. The ensemble of their arguments renders this claim simply untenable.

Few phonological phenomena have so captured the attention of theorists and continued to baffle them as the phenomenon of tonal downstep. Downstep is the lowering of the tonal register that sometimes occurs between adjacent, otherwise identical tones. It is cumulative, and successive occurrences of the phenomenon result in ever lower settings of the tonal register. The present work reports on an instrumental study of downstep in Bimoba, a Gur language spoken in the Northern Region of Ghana. So far as I am aware, the present work is the only description in existence of tone in Bimoba.

Bimoba is a good candidate for a study of downstep, because it is a ‘three-tone’ language in which both Low tones (floating and non-floating) and Mid tones cause High tones to be downstepped. A number of phonological studies (based on auditory impressions only) of three-tone languages with downstep of High tone have claimed that the difference in pitch between a High and a following Mid is equivalent to that between a High and a following downstepped High. These include Supyire (Carlson 1983), Babanki (Hyman 1979), Moba (Russell 1986) and Kagoro (van de Kolk 1992). This issue is important to tone theorists because a number of proposals on the theory of downstep formally equate a downstepped High with one type of Mid tone. These include Clements (1983), Hyman (1986, 1993), Inkelas (1987) and Snider (1990). On the other hand, a number of other proposals account for downstep with phonetic implementation rules. These include Pierrehumbert (1980), Poser (1984), Beckman & Pierrehumbert (1986) and Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988). ‘If register shift is indeed a rule of phonetic implementation, there is no reason, a priori, for the interval of register shift to be equivalent to that found between two phonemic tones’ (Snider 1990: 470). So far as I am aware, no instrumental study has ever addressed this issue. The present study therefore undertakes to help fill this lacuna, and concludes that in Bimoba a Mid tone is phonetically indistinguishable from a downstepped High tone in comparable environments.

This volume impressively synthesises vast literatures from the fields of linguistics, bioacoustics, psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology, ethology and anthropology, and in the process raises a number of provocative questions regarding the contentious issue of human language origins. Because the book is so far-reaching, both in terms of the breadth of communicative phenomena which it covers and the depth in which it discusses them, a short review such as the present one can only scratch the surface of the wealth of information and ideas which it contains.

This book was written to fill a perceived need for a text covering a wide range of issues in comparative communication, for which it is certainly well suited. Those interested in the production and perception of auditory and visual signals, as well as in issues as diverse as evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, will find it an easily readable – or browseable – piece of work. As Hauser notes, he has ‘attempted to write a book that is aimed primarily at the expert while being useful to those wishing to pick out pieces...for undergraduate and graduate instruction’ (p. 14). The book is successful along both lines. It is extremely well organised and well indexed, making it easy to select case studies relevant to specific communicative phenomena (e.g. audition, vocalisation, acquisition, signed languages, etc.) or particular species (humans, monkeys, anurans, birds, etc.). Particularly useful are the large number of graphics and illustrations, as well as conceptual ‘boxes’ which succinctly summarise key concepts or theoretical perspectives which may be unfamiliar to some readers (e.g. statistical information theory, neural tuning curves, source-filter theory and sexual selection theory, to name just a few).

In Chichewa, a Bantu language spoken mainly in Malawi, there is a contrast between high and low tone, as illustrated by such minimal pairs as mtengo ‘price’ vs. mténgo ‘tree’. But there is a strong asymmetry between the two tones in their phonological behaviour: high tone is phonologically active, while low tone is phonologically inert. Tone changes occur in Chichewa only if there is a high tone present in the phrase; a phrase composed only of low-toned morphemes is always realised unchanged with all low tones. The tonal phonology of the language can be described completely without reference to low tone (Kanerva 1989), as is typical for the Bantu languages (Stevick 1969).

I argue in this paper that this asymmetry is due to underspecification. The contrast in Chichewa is a privative one between high tone and no tone. Low tone is phonologically inert because it is simply the absence of tone. In particular, low tone is absent from surface representation. Syllables that are not specified as high-toned are assigned F0 by a non-linear transition function, as proposed for English intonation by Pierre-humbert (1980).

The kinds of rhythmical variation I will examine in this paper can be observed in some double-accented Hungarian words, and can be exemplified by the changes that the stressing of the numeric compound ′tizen′három ‘thirteen’ may undergo when it is embedded in phrases. The stressing of this word may become tizen′három in the phrase ′pont tizen′három ‘exactly thirteen’ and ′ tizen′három in the phrase ′ tizen′három ′pont ‘thirteen points’. The two processes, however, are not quite symmetrical in their range of application; the first kind of change occurs in only a subset of the words affected by the second kind. The symbol ′ in the examples represents a pitch accent on the syllable whose orthographic form it precedes.

These changes are the Hungarian counterparts of the two kinds of rhythmical variation in English, manifested, for instance, by the different realisations of the word ′thir′teen, when it is embedded in phrases like ′thirteen ′points or ′just thir′teen. However, while rhythmical variation in English is extremely widespread, in Hungarian it is restricted to certain classes of words. Besides, rhythmical variation in English lacks the asymmetry between the two processes; both kinds of change affect the same set of words.

This article concentrates on rhythmical variation in Hungarian and on the implications of this variation for metrical theory.

The participants at the Montréal Roundtable included Paul Kiparsky, Wolfgang U. Dressler and Joan Bybee, all of them major figures in recent morphological debates, as well as Alan Ford and Rajendra Singh, the authors of a theory of morphology which is less well known but equally ambitious. The bulk of this book consists of target articles on these four theoretical standpoints followed by comments by one or two commentators, replies by the protagonists, and transcripts of discussion. The commentators are Heather Goad, Richard Janda, K. P. Mohanan and Douglas C. Walker, and in general they do a good job. But the discussion sections are what you will turn to first if you have ever asked yourself questions such as ‘I wonder how Kiparsky (or Dressler) would respond to that argument of Bybee (or Ford & Singh)?’. Singh and Desrochers are to be congratulated on producing such a full report of a conference with such high-profile participants.

Vowel harmony systems have presented descriptive challenges for virtually every well-articulated theory within the framework of generative phonology. Significantly, no comprehensive and completely satisfactory account in a rule-based theory exists for one of the best studied of these systems, that of Hungarian. The novel approach of Optimality Theory (henceforth OT), as originally developed by Prince & Smolensky (1993) and McCarthy & Prince (1993a, b, 1995), has been shown to offer insightful solutions to vexing problems of prosodic phonology and morphology. This paper seeks to relate the insights of OT to the description of Hungarian vowel harmony: it provides a detailed description of the facts, offers solutions to heretofore unresolved problems, and draws conclusions for general theoretical issues within the OT model.

In §2 we present the facts of backness harmony as the empirical backdrop to the ensuing discussions. In §3 we present an analysis of backness harmony in OT. The ‘spreading’ of the feature [±back] is accounted for by an alignment constraint which is formulated as a constraint prohibiting vowels from intervening between the right edge of a backness feature and the right edge of the word, following proposals of Ellison (1995), Kirchner (1993) and Zoll (1996). We analyse certain roots with floating features, adopting a proposal by Zoll (1996) which ensures that floating features are in fact realised in outputs (unless blocked by satisfaction of higher-ranked constraints). We also assume, following much recent work in OT (Beckman 1995, 1997, 1998, McCarthy & Prince 1995, Steriade 1995, Zoll 1996), that certain prominent positions (e.g. roots) may be subject to more stringent faithfulness constraints than are less prominent positions (e.g. affixes). We further demonstrate that inventory constraints interact with other constraints to determine optimal outputs. In §4 roundness harmony data are presented. We argue that while backness harmony involves alignment constraints, so-called ‘roundness harmony’ does not, and hence that it is a mistake to assume that all cases of vowel harmony involve alignment constraints.

One of the major advances in phonological theory during the past twenty years has been the refinement of a theory regarding the representation and behaviour of tones (Goldsmith 1976, 1990, Fromkin 1978, Clements & Goldsmith 1984, Hyman 1986, 1993, Pulleyblank 1986, 1997), particularly for African tone languages and East Asian tone languages (for recent reviews see Odden 1995 and Yip 1995). A general outline of such a theory, using an autosegmental framework, might be something like the following: (a) Tones or tone melodies are represented in underlying phonological representations (UR); in some cases they are linked to specific ‘tone-bearing units’ (TBUs) such as syllables, moras or vowels on other tiers in UR, and in other cases they are unlinked. (b) Phonological rules will associate tones with correct TBUs according to universal and language-specific principles, including a universal well-formedness condition, such that no tones or TBUs which remain at the end of the derivation are unassociated. Tones may be delinked and omitted or reassociated by phonological rules, which may involve tone spreading, tone sandhi and a number of other phenomena. (c) Tones have a primarily lexical rather than syntagmatic function. (d) Contour tones are represented in UR as a sequence of two or more level tones, and function as tone sequences in tone rules, such that for example an underlying HL sequence may surface as either a falling contour tone on a single TBU or a high–low sequence on two adjacent TBUs. (e) It is assumed that tonal systems in all languages follow the same universal principles, which underlie the theory outlined here.

This is an unusual book. For one thing, it is huge: two volumes, over 1000 pages, with articles on fifty different languages or groups. For another, the list of contributors is quite diverse, including a few phonologists with specific language interests (Shmuel Bolozky, Robert D. Hoberman, Maria-Rosa Lloret and Joseph L. Malone), a few linguists who are better known for their work in areas other than phonology (Bernard Comrie, Jeffrey Heath, H. Craig Melchert and Johanna Nichols) and a group of distinguished experts on particular languages or families (including Giorgio Buccellati, Gene Gragg, Robert Hetzron, Wolf Leslau, Paul Newman and others).

The goals of this book are also a bit unusual. In his introduction, the editor says this:

The idea for this volume came about as I searched in vain for a book which would enable my students to gain a concrete familiarity of solid phonological work by subjecting them to the exposure of many of today's (hard-)working linguists who would concisely describe and comment on the phonological processes in and structures of languages which they have carefully scrutinized, both ancient or medieval and modern. (p. xvi)

This is an attractive concept; undergraduate and beginning graduate students would undoubtedly benefit from studying and perhaps attempting to reanalyse a carefully presented description of the phonemic system and morphophonemic processes of an unfamiliar language. More advanced graduate students or established scholars could also benefit from having access to compact descriptions that summarise potentially interesting phenomena and give references to consult for further research.

Ladd's Intonational phonology is a substantial addition to an area that has only recently ‘arrived’. Fortunately for the field of intonational phonology, the past two decades have seen a number of seminal contributions from phonologists, including Mark Liberman, Gösta Bruce, Janet Pierrehumbert and Ladd himself. Work on intonation, which has advanced in sync with modern linguistic theory, can also look back on quite a number of rather specific studies by phoneticians and rather general descriptive accounts by linguists and English teachers on this continent and in Europe.

The book's basic goal is to present the subject matter of intonational phonology to the non-specialist linguist. The material is not only summarised but also accompanied by critical comments. Ladd's goal of keeping the book accessible to the non-specialist may limit the depth of the presentation of the basic material and the definitiveness of the critical comments, but for many this will be a reasonable price to pay for breadth of coverage.