It is generally believed that Turkish stress is always word-final. Closer examination, however, reveals several types of exceptions to this pattern involving both roots and affixes. This paper proposes a unified analysis of regular and irregular stress in Turkish that crucially depends on our definition of the Phonological Word. In addition, we discuss stress in constituents beyond the word, and provide evidence for the Clitic Group as well as the Phonological Phrase. Finally, we also briefly discuss vowel harmony and a set of syllabification phenomena, and show how the latter, in particular, provide independent support for the proposal we advance here.

This paper presents a theory of morphophonology based on a development in the theory of faithfulness in Optimality Theory. A new constraint type, anti-faithfulness, is proposed that evaluates a pair of related words and requires an alternation in the shared stem. This constraint type is motivated initially by a set of problems, e.g. morphological deletions, segmental exchanges and non-structure preserving processes, which show that morphophonology must encompass more than markedness–faithfulness interactions. The anti-faithfulness thesis is then applied to accentual processes in which affixes idiosyncratically cause deletion of accent in a neighbouring morpheme. It is argued that anti-faithfulness both motivates the observed deletion and accounts for its properties with principles that are generally available in phonological theory. Anti-faithfulness is then shown to extend naturally to the analysis of other affix-induced alternations, including accent insertions, shifts, and retractions of stress and tone, a result which distinguishes this theory from plausible alternatives.

If there is such a person as the average phonologist, he might have a conception of the relation between phonetics and phonology that comes close to the relation between social perceptions of crimes and a Code of Criminal Law. The Code's definition of various types of crimes and the penalty each type carries ultimately reflect, to put it crudely, the feelings of the people. Also, the Code's development will reflect social change. Criminal codes will typically incorporate the changing perceptions of the general public, and will now begin to include articles devoted to the use of the Internet, for instance. But at the end of the day, what counts in a law suit is what is in the Criminal Code, not the feelings of the people. So it is with phonology. It is easy to show that lexical forms are frequently related to functional (ergonomic) considerations, and that the way the grammar processes them into surface representations will amount to a reasonable articulatory task for the speaker, while equally the acoustic result will enable the listener to recognise these forms with reasonable ease. However, ultimately we say things the way we do because our lexical representations are the way they are, and our phonological grammar is the way it is.

Among 4,499 segmental malformations found in English loanwords in three large corpora of French, the laryngeal /h/ is the only segment that is never adapted, i.e. replaced by another segment. We suggest that the systematic deletion of /h/ in French follows from the fact that, phonologically, French, like Portuguese and Italian, does not employ the Pharyngeal node, the articulator that characterises gutturals. This prevents English /h/ from being handled phonologically (deleted or substituted) in those languages. The non-availability of the Pharyngeal node also explains systematic deletion of the pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Arabic loanwords in French. In contrast, English /h/ is adapted by languages employing the Pharyngeal node phonologically, such as Spanish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Mandarin Chinese, Greek and Russian. Likewise, the availability of the Pharyngeal node in Fula and English allows the adaptation of Arabic pharyngeal and laryngeal gutturals in Fula, and non-glottal gutturals in English.

It is often assumed that there is a sharp division between phonetic and phonological processes, but the two are often strikingly similar, as in the case of phonetic consonant–vowel coarticulation and phonological assimilation between consonants and vowels. Parallels of this kind are best accounted for if both types of phenomena are analysed within a unified framework, so similarities result from the fact that both phonetic and phonological processes are subject to the same constraints. A unified model of phonetics and phonology is developed and exemplified through the analysis of parallel phonetic and phonological assimilation processes. The model operates in terms of scalar phonetic representations to accommodate phonetic detail, but categorical phenomena can still be derived from the interaction of speech production constraints with constraints that motivate the formation of distinct categories of sounds for the purposes of linguistic contrast.

The widely attested onset/coda asymmetry involves a situation in which the inventory of phonemes in syllable-final position in a particular language is a subset of those which contrast in onsets. The inverse of this pattern has been claimed to never occur (Goldsmith 1990, Beckman 1998). However, this prediction is falsified by Chamicuro, a Peruvian language in which /h/ and /[glottal plosive]/ are systematically restricted to coda position. Since no permutation of all known constraints can account for this unusual distribution, a new constraint is necessary. I propose that we invoke HAVEPLACE and subcategorise it for onsets. This positional markedness filter permits placeless (laryngeal) consonants to surface in codas, but blocks them in onsets. A beneficial side-effect of this analysis is that it preserves the onset/coda asymmetry while allowing /[glottal plosive]/ and /h/ to be the only principled exceptions to it.

Through an investigation of glottalisation in several languages of North America, this article examines the role of perception in the grammatical distribution of segments. Specifically, we consider the hypothesis that perceptual factors on the timing of glottalisation in consonants determine the arrangement of such consonants phonologically. Our conclusion is in the negative. In the cases we study, the distribution of glottalisation appears to be governed by syllable structure, not by glottal timing. We interpret the patterns presented as evidence for a modular theory of phonetics and phonology rather than a theory where properties of articulator timing are directly referenced by phonological constraints. Patterns of glottalisation result from the interaction of phonological submodules that are largely independent of each other, though properties of particular modules may be influenced by phonetic factors.

In this paper, we use articulatory measures to determine whether Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process or a concrete phonetic process depending on articulatory timing. We examine tongue position during /l/ before underlying schwa and epenthetic schwa and in coda position. We find greater tip raising before both types of schwa, indicating light /l/ before schwa and dark /l/ in coda position. We argue that the ability of epenthetic schwa to condition the /l/ alternation shows that Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process involving insertion of some unit, and cannot be accounted for within Articulatory Phonology.

This paper proposes a phonetically based account of phonological stop assibilation. We first review evidence for the phonological representation of sibilants proposed by Jakobson et al. (1951) and others. An examination of cross-linguistic data involving phonological assibilation reveals two asymmetries: (a) only high vocoids constitute assibilation triggers; (b) only following vocoids, not preceding vocoids, constitute assibilation triggers. It is then shown that high vocoid-conditioned phonological stop assibilation is motivated by the brief period of turbulence that sometimes occurs at the release of a plosive into a high vocoid. We argue that this turbulence is interpreted in phonology as the insertion of the feature [+strident] into the representation of the plosive, with the loss of the feature [−continuant] in the case of frication. Not only does this phonetic analysis explain the phonetic origin of assibilation, it also correctly reflects the cross-linguistic conditions on high vocoid-conditioned phonological assibilation.

Hammond's book is the volume on English in the series The Phonology of the World's Languages; and therein lies an inevitable problem. Writing a contribution for a series with as many definite articles as this one, and on English, which like it or not, and with no disrespect to the less attended-to languages of the world, has been the focus of quite disproportionate phonological attention, is for anyone a rather daunting task. This means that there is even more literature to review than usual in a book of this kind, and more controversies to be embroiled in; and in consequence, there will inevitably be restrictions in coverage. What matters, then, is that the author must set out what he intends to do, be consistent with that, and explain his choices in terms of those entirely inevitable restrictions. Although this book has many good points, it often seems that Hammond does not actually carry through his stated intentions, or justify the choices he has made as cogently as might be hoped.

It is generally acknowledged, by both its proponents and detractors, that Optimality Theory has provoked a reexamination, in recent years, of the role of functional considerations, and their typological reflexes, in phonological theory. April McMahon's Change, chance, and optimality attempts an in-depth examination of this issue, particularly from the perspective of the relation between synchrony and diachrony in linguistic theory. The issue, and OT's general stance towards it, are summarised by Prince & Smolensky (1993: 198):

One might feel compelled to view a grammar as a more-or-less arbitrary assortment of formal rules, where the principles that the rules subserve (the ‘laws’) are placed entirely outside the grammar, beyond the purview of formal or theoretical analysis, inert but admired. It is not unheard of to conduct phonology in this fashion. We urge a reassessment of this essentially formalist position. If phonology is separated from the principles of well-formedness (the ‘laws’) that drive it, the resulting loss of constraint and theoretical depth will mark as major defeat for the enterprise. The danger, therefore, lies in the other direction: clinging to a conception of Universal Grammar as little more than a loose organizing framework for grammars. A much stronger stance, in accord with the thrust of recent work, is available. When the scalar and the gradient are recognized and brought within the purview of theory, Universal Grammar can supply the very substance from which grammars are built: a set of highly general constraints which, through ranking, interact to produce the elaborate particularity of individual languages.

This paper presents evidence for two claims: (a) that the underlying contrast between stops in Swiss German dialects is based purely on quantity and (b) that the duration of the stop closure is its sole reliable phonetic reflex, i.e. there is a geminate–singleton opposition acoustically manifested in long–short closure duration. Using production and perception data on initial, medial and final stops in Thurgovian, a dialect spoken in north-eastern Switzerland, we show that the pattern of phrase-medial contrast neutralisation supports both arguments: when the extra phonological length position of a geminate is not syllabifiable, the closure duration shortens and underlying geminates and singletons become indistinguishable. The perception data in particular make evident that closure duration is the crucial cue of the underlying contrast, because, in the absence of this phonetic correlate, listeners can no longer discriminate an underlying geminate from a singleton. The results bear not only on central issues concerning the representation of geminates but also on some intricacies of the phonology–phonetics interface.

The phonology of Norwegian is the ninth book in the Oxford University Press series The Phonology of the World's Languages. With Kristoffersen's book, nearly half of this series is devoted to studies of Germanic languages, in which context his work supplements previous volumes on Dutch (Booij 1995), German (Wiese 1996) and English (Hammond 1999). The phonology of Norwegian fits comfortably into this series and the author has been successful in achieving his stated purpose of giving a thorough presentation of the phonological facts of Norwegian as well as offering analyses of many of those facts. The phonology of Norwegian can be seen as supplanting Kristoffersen (1991), the author's doctoral dissertation from the University of Tromsø, which has until this point arguably been the most comprehensive discussion of Norwegian phonology.

In this paper, I propose an optimality-theoretic account of the generalisation that deletion processes that apply to intervocalic biconsonantal clusters canonically delete the first consonant (schematically, VC1C2V → VC2V). The approach to contextual neutralisation proposed here has two main components. First, I follow the licensing-by-cue framework (e.g. Steriade 1997) in identifying ‘weak’ elements as those without strong perceptual cues. Second, I argue that the constraints responsible for contextual neutralisation ‘target’ weak elements. This approach captures the deletion generalisation above, because the relevant targeted constraint prefers only the correct output VC2V (from which the weak consonant C1 has been removed), not the incorrect output VC1V. Intuitively, the representation containing a weak element (VC1C2V) is compelled to neutralise to a representation that is perceptually very similar (VC2V). The targeted-constraint approach is formalised by replacing the standard violation-based definition of OT optimisation with a new definition – which is equivalent except when ‘targeted’ constraints are involved – based on harmonic orderings. The approach is shown to extend to certain cases of (i) contextually determined feature neutralisation and (ii) phonological opacity.

Acquisition and the lexicon collects revised versions of nineteen primary papers and four commentaries presented at the 5th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, held at Northwestern University in July 1996. It is not possible to do justice to each paper in a collection this large and diverse, so individual papers will be discussed as they relate to three themes that emerge from the book as a whole: (i) the relationship between phonology and speech processing – this volume contains more papers on speech processing than its predecessors in the Laboratory Phonology series, which brings to the forefront questions about the relationship between phonological theory and theories of speech processing; (ii) the phonetics–phonology divide – a number of the phonology papers question the common assumption that phonetics and phonology are separate components of grammar; (iii) frequency effects – results are presented showing effects of the frequency of words and other phonological units in a striking variety of domains.

The theory of reduplication developed in this book distinguishes itself from most recent work in reduplication in important ways. First of all, it adopts the Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994, Noyer 1997) and a derivational, rule-based approach to reduplication (and to phonology in general). It explicitly argues against parallel, surface-based models of prosodic morphology, like Optimality Theory (McCarthy & Prince 1993, Prince & Smolensky 1993, etc.). Further, the analyses proposed in the book reject the proposal, current since McCarthy & Prince (1986), that the shape of reduplicative morphemes (like other fixed-shape morphemes) is constrained to be (roughly) equivalent to a prosodic constituent, syllable or foot. The book is organised as follows. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1 outlining the goals of the book, Chapter 2 introduces enough of the theory to show how backcopying in reduplication, argued since Wilbur (1973) to be impossible to account for without reference to reduplicative surface-identity effects, can be handled in a derivational framework. Chapter 3, the longest chapter, discusses the technical details of the theory in more detail and goes on to show how the fixed shape and unmarked featural and prosodic structure typical of reduplicative morphemes can be accounted for without reference to either prosodic structure or general markedness. The fourth and final chapter discusses in more detail theoretical issues raised in earlier chapters, like how this approach defines markedness of reduplication patterns and avoids reduplication-specific mechanisms. The review discusses each of these points in turn.

This book grew out of a 1997 workshop sponsored by Aditi Lahiri and her group at the University of Constance. It consists of eleven chapters and an introduction by Aditi Lahiri, the editor. The articles are focused largely on Germanic languages, although not entirely, as Bengali and Latin also receive detailed discussion. There is diversity in the range of topics covered in the volume – tonogenesis, stress, quantity changes, voicing alternations, allomorphy, paradigms and grammaticalisation are some of the major areas of phonology and morphology that are addressed. Authors adopt different theoretical frameworks, with Optimality Theory playing some role in many articles. Optimality Theory is assumed by some, argued against by others and modified by yet others.