Namwanga is a Bantu language spoken in the Northern province of Zambia.In this paper I would like to present an overview of Namwanga verbal tonology, specifically focusing on the issue of where downstep occurs and how best to account for it. It will be argued that the surface distribution of downstep can be most insightfully accounted for if one assumes that many of the underlying H's fuse together. Determining which H's fuse and which do not is quite complex and the subject of rigorous examination.

Among the many types of non-concatentative morphemes are auto- segments or floating features which, in order to be realised phonologically, must attach to a root node in the stem. Akinlabi (1996) terms this process FEATURAL AFFIXATION. Featural affixes are of particular interest for models of reduplication, which make varying predictions as to whether or not they will be copied. In segmental models such as that of Marantz (1982), where nothing other than the underlying segmental base of the melody is copied, we would not expect the featural affix to be ‘transferred’ (Clements 1985a, Myers & Carleton 1996) between base and reduplicant.In models where the entire base is copied, such as that of Steriade (1988), featural transfer depends on the particular conception of the grammar. Within serial models of the grammar featural transfer depends crucially on the ordering of word-formation rules and phonological rules, while in a non-serial model like Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) featural transfer depends on the rank ordering of relevant constraints. The goal of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of featural affixation and featural transfer by presenting a constraint-based account of consonant mutation in Seereer-Siin, an Atlantic (Niger-Congo) language related to Fula, and by focusing specifically on the interaction of consonant mutation and reduplication. In the analysis presented here I consider mutation to be the result of featural affixation to the root node of a stem-initial consonant.

There are currently many proposals for analysing cross-linguistic vowel length and consonant weight patterns within an Optimality Theory (OT) framework. The basic claim is that vowel length and consonant weight are determined by the interaction of markedness constraints on moraic content and constraints requiring faithfulness to underlying moraicity.

In this paper, I will show how the constraints used in one such proposal (Morén 1999) provide an analysis of the core syllable weight of Kashmiri, and that the inclusion of several other constraints proposed in the literature allows us to account for the previously puzzling distribution of stress in this language. Besides the empirical importance of both providing an analysis of Kashmiri stress and weight and demonstrating a language type predicted by Morén's weight typology, an added theoretical point is the demonstration that closed syllables may vary in weight depending on surface stress assignment. This is in line with work of Kager (1989), Hayes (1995), Rice (1996) and Broselow et al. (1997), but in contrast with many other theories which treat consonant weight for a particular segment in a given syllabic position as static within a given language. Further, the OT analysis presented here provides the necessary tools to allow the expression of weight hierarchies, while maintaining the restrictive theory of weight offered by a single-tiered moraic approach.

If an epenthetic vowel is required for syllable structure reasons, its position in a string may be determined by ‘directionality’, with the construction of maximal syllables beginning from a word edge (Itô 1986, 1989, Farwaneh 1995). Arabic has served as the prime example of directionality, but other Semitic languages have also played a role, such as Harari (Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979, Itô 1986) and Tigrinya (Denais 1990, Berhane 1991). In these languages the sonority of heterosyllabic (coda–onset) consonant sequences neither conditions insertion nor affects the site of the epenthetic vowel. Epenthesis is triggered by constraints on maximal syllable size, and the position of the epenthetic vowel is determined by directionality. As a result, violations of SYLLABLE CONTACT abound. Syllable contact can be defined as the requirement that a coda be more sonorous than a following onset (Murray & Vennemann 1983, Vennemann 1988).

In this article, I provide new data from Chaha, an Ethiopian Semitic language of the Gurage family, which demonstrate an intriguing difference from Semitic languages such as Harari, Tigrinya and Arabic.

The influence of non-contrastive phonetic details such as intergestural timing, stop release burst and articulatory effort expense on phonological patterning has been discussed extensively in Browman & Goldstein (1992), Flemming (1995), Jun (1995), Kirchner (1997), Silverman (1997), Boersma (1998), Gordon (1999), Hayes (1999), Steriade (1999, 2000), Zhang (forthcoming), among others. Even though the way in which phonology incorporates phonetic factors is debatable (see Hayes & Steriade, forthcoming for an overview of the debate and § 3.1.1 for more detailed discussion), the fact that there exist phonological patterns that are governed by phonetic factors seems less so. In this paper, without committing myself to any view of how phonetic factors are encoded in phonology, I present the case of Chinese retroflex suffixation in support of the relevance of non-contrastive phonetic features to categorical phonological patterning. In addition, I argue that MAXFEATURE constraints (Lombardi 1995, 1998, Casali 1996, Pulleyblank 1996, Causley 1997, Walker 1999; henceforth Max[F]) are needed to account for the data in question.

Determining where words begin and end can be a vexing task; one which requires knowledge of the phonological and morphosyntactic structure of a language. Studies on the phonological word is a compilation of articles which grew from a conference on the phonological word held in Berlin in 1997. There are nine papers, the first being a useful overview of the state of the art with respect to the phonological word. The remaining articles provide detailed studies from a diverse set of language families, including Salishan (Beck), Bantu (Downing), Indo-European (Booij, Hall, Raffelsiefen, Vigário), Algonquian (Russell), Siouan (Russell), as well as from Israeli Sign Language (Sandler). Each study provides detailed argumentation and makes more than a few points of interest regarding issues surrounding the phonological word. The volume provides many valuable contributions of interest to both theoretically and empirically inclined phonologists and morphologists.

A thorough coverage of each contribution would lead well beyond the scope of this review. Instead, following the overview, a central theoretical and empirical point from each article will be provided. This is followed by a brief discussion of some of the general and recurrent themes of the studies presented in the book.

This volume consists of a subset of the papers presented at a workshop on Prosodic Morphology which took place in June 1994 at the Research Institute for Language and Speech at Utrecht University.We wish to acknowledge the helpful comments of Colin Wilson and Rachel Walker, neither of whom should accept any responsibility for any remaining errors or unreadability. There are two main themes that hold the volume together; the first and most obvious theme is the interface between morphology and phonology/prosody, and the second is the use of Optimality Theory (OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) to analyse aspects of this interface. We comment on the individual chapters of the volume in § 2 below, and offer some general concluding remarks in § 3.