Hudson () argues raising occurs in not only syntax but also semantics and general cognition and that this supports the hypothesis that language is part of general cognition. One might then expect phonological structures too to be of a sort found in general cognition, and Hudson wonders whether raising occurs also in phonology. As Tallerman () notes, many and unconvincing are the attempts to demonstrate that phenomena thought of as syntactic occur also in phonology, but a truly convincing demonstration would show that movement, normally thought quintessentially syntactic, also occurs in phonology. Raising is a kind of movement; I identify two instances of it in phonology. The first is where the genitive z ending is ‘suppressed’ when the base already has a z ending (child’s, children’s, kid’s, *kids’s, kids’). The second is a proposed phenomenon of ‘raising to onset’: I present a dependency syntagmatics for English phonology and argue that if it is to adequately account for positionally conditioned consonant allophony and if, as is plausible, weak-syllables contain no nucleus, then there must be raising to onset analogous to syntactic raising to subject.

By working through phonological questions using sign language data we arrive at a new understanding of the very nature of phonology, of the very nature of language. This chapter gives a brief historical look into the field from its inception, lays out the reasons why thinking about sign language phonology opens up new ways to understand the nature of language, broadly construed, and provides enough background on the units of word-level phonology in sign languages to see practical and theoretical connections to parallel issues in spoken language phonology.