This paper reports on a phonetic and phonological study of /t/-affrication in spontaneous British English Received Pronunciation. The study is motivated by the uncertainty surrounding plosive affrication in the literature on lenition and fortition. We suggest that a decision as to the status of a given pattern involving affrication in terms of lenition or fortition should be based on thorough phonetic and phonological analysis. We present a phonetic and phonological account of /t/-affrication, which takes into consideration the temporal and spectral characteristics of the sounds involved, as well as their distribution across phonological environments. Crucially, we compare affricated instances of /t/ with aspirated and fricated ones in the same dataset – the former arguably unmarked in this variety, the latter uncontroversially the result of lenition. We argue that the phonetic and phonological characteristics of /t/-affrication presented in this paper are consistent with an account in terms of fortition rather than lenition.

The lexical tone and intonation contrasts in the Limburgish dialect of Maastricht are remarkable in a number of ways. While a falling pitch contour on an IP-medial syllable signals a non-declarative intonation, on an IP-final syllable it signals a declarative intonation. In addition, although there is a binary tone contrast (Accent 1 vs. Accent 2) and four nuclear intonation contours, only three intonation contours exist for nuclear syllables with Accent 2, while in IP-final position only two intonation contours exist for nuclear syllables with Accent 1, so that the full set of four intonation contours is only observable in IP-medial nuclear syllables with Accent 1. The context-dependent function of the pitch fall and the asymmetries are explained by a grammar in which the OCP is enforced absolutely, and the number of tones per syllable is restricted to two, unless the three tones each represent a different morpheme: OCP, Realise.orph≫#TTT.

The Dutch lexicon contains very few sequences of a long vowel followed by a consonant cluster whose second member is a non-coronal. We provide experimental evidence that Dutch speakers have implicit knowledge of this gap, which cannot be reduced to the probability of segmental sequences or to word-likeness as measured by neighbourhood density. The experiment also suggests that the ill-formedness of this sequence is mediated by syllable structure: it has a weaker effect on speakers' judgements when the last consonant begins a new syllable. We provide an account in terms of Hayes & Wilson's (2008) maximum entropy model of phonotactics, using constraints that go beyond the complexity permitted by their model of constraint induction.

This paper reexamines the issue of the mora, the foot and the syllable in Tokyo Japanese, and shows that whereas the mora and the foot are indisputably present and active, the evidence for the syllable is inconspicuous and disputable. Building on this observation, I claim that Tokyo Japanese makes no use of the syllable. Instead, two types of mora are distinguished: regular CV moras and weak (deficient) moras. Weak moras include the moraic nasal, the first part of a geminate and the second part of a long vowel, as well as moras containing an onsetless vowel, a devoiced vowel or an epenthetic vowel. I further argue that feet obey a set of structural constraints stipulating that they be properly headed by a regular full mora. With this enriched notion of mora type, the paper argues that neither the syllable nor any other level of the prosodic hierarchy is obligatory in all languages.