One of the most significant challenges in the study of speech production is to acquire a theoretical understanding of how speakers coordinate articulatory movements. A variety of work has demonstrated that articulatory, prosodic and extralinguistic factors all influence speech timing in a complex and interactive way. Models such as Articulatory Phonology that stipulate the relative timing of articulatory units must be revised to allow for this variability. Such a revision is outlined below.

The following work should be viewed as a presentation of a new framework for conceptualising articulatory timing. This approach, meant to be programmatic rather than conclusive, is productive if it motivates research that might not otherwise have been undertaken. §1 overviews Articulatory Phonology. The implementation of articulatory timing in terms of phasing relations is discussed. Speech production data bearing on timing variability are discussed in §2. §3 argues for an alternative to Articulatory Phonology's current rule-based approach to intergestural timing that can allow for linguistic and extralinguistic variables to systematically influence phasing relations. §3.2 introduces the PHASE WINDOW framework, which allows the degree of articulatory overlap between linguistic gestures to vary within a constrained range. Finally, §4 concerns the relation of intergestural timing to the postulation of the segment as a primitive unit in phonology. It is hypothesised that certain intergestural timing relations are stable and lexically specified. Gestures whose coordination is constrained by lexical PHASE WINDOWS seem to bear a close relation to those conglomerates of gestures that constitute what is traditionally considered to be a segment.

In many languages, fundamental frequency shows a marked decrease utterance-finally or phrase-finally. Ladefoged (1982) generalises that ‘in nearly all languages the completion of a grammatical unit such as a normal sentence is signaled by a falling pitch’. Bolinger (1978) also writes that ‘the most widely diffused intonational phenomenon seems to be the tendency to “go down at the end”’. These sorts of abrupt decreases which affect only the end of the utterance (known as FINAL LOWERING) are distinct from gradual decreases in fundamental frequency over the course of the entire utterance (known as DECLINATION). Bolinger (1978) notes the same distinction, characterising it as the difference between ‘a rapid downward motion at the very end, usually if not always associated with a terminal accent’ and ‘downward drift from a high beginning’. Final lowering as distinct from declination is documented in Japanese by Poser (1984) and by Pierrehumbert & Beckman (1988); in English by Liberman & Pierrehumbert (1984); in Dutch by Gussenhoven & Rietveld (1988); in Danish by Thorsen (1985); in Yoruba by Connell & Ladd (1990) and by Laniran (1992); and in Kikuyu by Clements & Ford (1981) (although not all authors use the exact terminology presented here).

Analyses of final lowering range from attributing final lowering to changes in tonal categories (discussed below in §4) to attributing final lowering to compression of the pitch range in the last section of the sentence (discussed below in §5.1). Tone languages provide an interesting testing ground for analyses of final lowering. Careful experimental study, controlling for the position of a tone from the beginning and from the end of a sentence, is one way to begin to sort out the effects of various factors such as declination and final lowering on fundamental frequency.

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).

Like many of the zone A Bantu languages of western equatorial Africa, Basaa, which is spoken over a large area to the north-east and east of Douala, Cameroon, shows an inventory of seven surface vowels (Guthrie 1953). The Basaa forms cited in this article, all of which are found in the comprehensive Dictionnaire Basaa-Français (Lemb & de Gastines 1973), are transcribed using the vowel symbols in (1):

These vowel symbols differ from those used by Guthrie only in that the hooks are eliminated from underneath his [i] and [u] and the dots are eliminated from underneath his [???] and [???]. I assume for these vowels the characteristics indicated in (1), where non-parenthesised feature specifications are a property of surface phonological representation and parenthesised feature specifications are default phonetic values. Following Hyman's (1988) analysis of Esimbi, another Cameroonian language containing these vowels in its inventory, I take [E] and [ɔ] to be low.

The verb roots in (2) contain instances of each of the seven surface vowels of Basaa:

Though bare verb roots may surface unsuffixed, suffixal extensions may also be added to give applied, passive, habitual, direct causative, indirect causative, simultaneous, associative, possessive, reversive, reflexive, stative and nominalised forms. Of interest to us is the vowel raising induced within the verb root when certain of these suffixal extensions are added. In (3) we see the CVC verb forms of (2) along with their corresponding applied and indirect causative forms:

Other suffixal extensions that induce raising are the passive, direct causative, simultaneous, reversive and stative extensions. For example, these other suffixal extensions attach to /ten/, one of the verb roots in (3), to give [tina], [tinis], [tinha], [tinil] and [tiní], respectively.