Generative and Nonlinear Phonology

This book is part of a series intended for students at undergraduate and postgraduate level and aims to provide a broad view of the linguistics field such as is hard to obtain exclusively from scholarly journals.

Generative phonology is a developing field of linguistics, and is producing both rival interpretations and models. This book provides a clear and accessible evaluation of the debate. It provides a detailed overview of the main models, revealing that they are often complimentary rather than contradictory, and how these can be interconnect and be used together to explore the subject.

Part 1 Introduction: scope of this book
from classical phonemics to generative phonology
phonemes or features?
levels of representation
aspects of a standard generative analysis of Midi French
phonology within the model of grammar. Part 2 The theory of distinctive features: some general assumptions
the phonetic features and their articulatory correlates
universalism revisited
the acoustic/auditory basis of DFs
invariance and distinctive features. Part 3 Binarism, full and partial specification, markedness and gestures: binarism
multivalued features
contrastivity, archiphonemes and redundancy rules
markedness theory
gestures. Part 4 The derivational issue - aspects of the abstractness-concreteness debate: aspects of the segmental phonology of English
objections to the vowel shift and velar softening
natural generative phonology (NGP)
in defence of the vowel shift. Part 5 Underspecification theory and lexical phonology: underspecification theory (UT)
Yawelmani vowels and underspecification
lexical phonology. Part 6 Metrical structures: syllable structure
stress and prominence. Part 7 Autosegmental and multidimensional phonology: tone in the SPE framework
the skeletal tier
further geometrical extensions
universal phonology and the "no rule" approach. Part 8 An outline of dependency phonology: suprasegmental representations
infrasegmental representations
back unrounded vowels. Appendix: phonetic symbols.