This paper explores a correlation between phonology and phonetics. It first reviews a phonological analysis that proposes that all full Mandarin rhymes are heavy and that all Shanghai rhymes are underlyingly light. Then it reports a small phonetic experiment that attempts to determine whether there is a phonetic correlate for the phonological claim. Four Mandarin speakers and five Shanghai speakers were recorded, each reading five sentences four times at normal speed. Average syllable durations were determined. It was found that the average syllable duration in Mandarin was 215 ms and that in Shanghai was 162 ms. Statistics show that the durational difference is significant. The result thus agrees with the phonological analysis. Implications and limitations of the present study will be discussed.

One of the major aims of linguistic theory is to determine what is universal vs. language-specific within grammatical systems. In phonology, for example, a number of universals have been proposed and incorporated into the various subtheories that deal with segmental and prosodic aspects of sound systems. In his original autosegmental theory, for instance, Goldsmith (1976) provided a formalism and a set of principles embodying a number of universal claims about how different tiers may link to each other. Most of the support for this theory came from the study of tone: tones (Ts) were said to reside on separate ‘tiers’ joined by association lines to their respective tone-bearing units (TBUs).

Korean possesses a rich onomatopoeic and mimetic vocabulary that may be augmented by partial reduplication and/or suffixation. This augmented category, which is referred to as partial extension in Jun (1993), is semantically characterised by a lengthening, or temporal extension of the base form:

The structural relationship of the primary/consonantal place features and the secondary/vowel place features has been the focus of much recent work in geometrical and hierarchical feature theories. Sagey (1986), Halle (1986), Selkirk (1988, 1991a, b) and others propose representations in which the secondary/vowel place features are structurally dependent on primary/consonantal place features, while Archangeli & Pulleyblank (1987), Steriade (1987), Clements (1989, 1991), Hume (1990, 1992) and Odden (1991) argue for the structural independence of primary/consonantal and secondary/vowel place features, though to different degrees.

In a typical Athapaskan language, consonants divide into three manners of articulation, stops/affricates, fricatives and sonorants. There are generally three major laryngeal classes in the stops/affricates, two in the fricatives and a single class in the sonorants. In this paper, I examine how laryngeal oppositions in stops/affricates and fricatives are best characterised. I argue in §§ 2—7 that stops/affricates (henceforth stops) are phonologically voiceless unaspirated, aspirated and glottalised, while fricatives exhibit a voiced-voiceless distinction. These classes do not account for all laryngeal interactions, however; evidence exists that aspiration and voicing cross-classify the stops and fricatives, with aspiration being necessary for fricatives and voicing for stops in late rules of the phonology; this is the topic of §§8-9. In addition, evidence suggests that while stops/affricates form a single class underlyingly, they are distinct at a late level. Implications of the analysis are discussed in §§10—11. Processes involving laryngeal features suggest a two-level model of phonology in which contrastive features are present underlyingly and predictable features are added postlexically for reasons of phonetic implementation. The absence of predictable features underlyingly argues against recent work that suggests that such features may be present at this level (e.g. Steriade 1992a, b, 1993b); their postlexical presence argues for a model in which the postlexical phonology is identifiable as the phonetic implementation component of the grammar (e.g. Mohanan 1986; see also Cohn 1993).

Basaa, a zone A Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, is only one among many genetically unrelated languages for which the positing of phonetically null phantom consonants facilitates a phonological account of certain otherwise unexpected surface forms encountered in derivational paradigms. Clements & Keyser (1983), Marlett & Stemberger (1983), Keyser & Kiparsky (1984), Crowhurst (1988) and Hualde (1992) propose that phantom consonants exist in Turkish, Seri, French, Finnish, Southern Paiute and Aranese Gascon, for example, syllabifying as onsets or codas where appropriate and in certain cases inducing the gemination of an adjacent consonantal segment or the lengthening of a preceding tautosyllabic vowel, as we shall see takes place in Basaa.

Megan Crowhurst's ‘Diminutives and augmentatives in Mexican Spanish: a prosodic analysis’ (1992, henceforth CRO) takes a fresh look at the thorny problem of explicating the distribution of the allomorphs -itV and -(e)citV of the Spanish diminutive suffix. CRO has conspicuous virtues. Among them is the limitation of data to a single dialect, namely Sonoran, of northern Mexico. This narrow focus is insurance against inadvertently mixing incompatible data, a special risk posed by the considerable dialect variability of productive diminutivisation. At the same time, CRO broadens its data base by taking into account the partial parallelism between diminutive -itV/-(e)citV and augmentative -otV/-(e)sotV.