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.

Blends, also called portmanteau words, are formed by fusing two words into one new word, where internal portions of the base words are often subtracted (one segmental string from the right part of the first word and another from the left part of the second word). For example, the English blend nixonomics has been formed by combining nixon and economics and subtracting the string neco. (For clarity of exposition, blends will be usually represented as nixo <n⋅eco> nomics, where the subtracted material is enclosed in angled brackets and the boundary between the base elements is indicated by ⋅).

Recent work in distinctive features and feature geometry has presented strong evidence that certain features are privative: they have no negative values, so a sound is either marked [F] or else it is not. Evidence comes from possible types of sounds (for example, multiply articulated segments, in Sagey 1986) and from the fact that the negative values of these features are not referred to in phonological rules. Currently there is a nearly universal consensus that Place features are privative, and converging evidence from several authors (Mester & Itô 1989; Cho 1990; Lombardi 1991, 1995a) that [voice] is privative also.

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.

What happens to tone when a form is reduplicated in a tone language? In Marantz's (1982) model of reduplication, it is only segmental melody that is copied from the base. This approach predicts that no tones of the base will appear on the reduplicant. In other models, the whole base is copied, including prosody (Steriade 1988; McCarthy & Prince 1988, forthcoming). This approach predicts that the tone of the base will always appear on the reduplicant, i.e. there will be ‘transfer’ of the tone (Clements 1985).

Theories of stress assignment commonly assume that syllable onsets do not determine a syllable's ability to attract stress. In the frameworks of McCarthy (1979) and Hayes (1981, 1995), for example, only the rhyme is projected in order to determine the weight of a syllable. In Moraic Theory (Hyman 1985), onsets do not contribute to the weight of a syllable as a consequence of the Onset Creation rule, by which onsets lose their weightbearing unit. In the framework of Hayes (1989), the rule of Weight-by-Position ensures that only coda consonants can ever be weight-bearing.

The group of guttural consonants consists of those consonants articulated at the back of the vocal tract or with some constriction of the pharynx: uvulars, pharyngeals, laryngeals and emphatics, or pharyngealised/uvularised consonants. These consonants pattern together in terms of several phonological properties, as extensively documented by McCarthy (1989, 1991, 1994). He argues that this natural class can be captured in a model of feature geometry by a node dependent on the Place node: the Pharyngeal node. However, the status of the laryngeal consonants within this class of segments is unresolved. While it is clear that the laryngeals [? h] pattern with the other guttural consonants in Semitic languages, these sounds have also been argued to lack Place specification altogether (Steriade 1987; Bessell 1992). McCarthy (1991, 1994) suggests that languages may in fact stipulate whether laryngeal consonants are specified with a Pharyngeal node, or are Placeless. Bessell & Czaykowska-Higgins (1992) and Bessell (1992), based on data from Interior Salish languages, argue that this selection is independent of the inventory of guttural segments within a language.

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).

One of the fundamental claims of modern phonology is that generalisations about phonemes are based on a small, universal set of phonetically defined features. The theory of distinctive features is a very powerful idea, insofar as it predicts that sets of phonemes will act together in specific ways within and across languages, allowing the voiceless stops [p t k] to serve as a unified target or trigger class, but ruling out the possibility that [p r y a] will function as a unitary class. Much of the appeal of distinctive features lies in the fact that the rich array of segments and processes encountered in the world's languages can be understood in terms of a very small number of features. Numerous hypotheses have been advanced regarding what that set of features is – see Jakobson et al. (1952), Chomsky & Halle (1968), Sagey (1990) and Clements & Hume (1995), inter al. The ideal set of features must be rich enough to express phonemic contrasts which actually exist, and must otherwise be capable of capturing generalisations about sound structure. Equally important, a theory of features should be maximally impoverished – it should use the minimum resources necessary to describe languages.

In a recent squib Manaster Ramer attempts to show ‘that rules of versification may not be sensitive to representations deeper than phonemic (or the similar lexical and syntactico-phonological levels of Lexical Phonology)’ (1994: 321–322). Manaster Ramer includes some of my work on Early Irish alliteration (1988c), challenging my claim that explication of such alliteration requires orthometric (versificational) interfacing at an underlying level of phonological representation and claiming that my explication ‘involve[s] rules which were clearly invented by native grammarians and metricians and often violated in natural, as opposed to formal, verse, and which, even more to the point, make crucial reference, not to deep levels of phonology, but rather to the orthography’ (1994: 321). I will attempt to counter this statement in §2, though I am somewhat handicapped by the fact that Manaster Ramer does not actually give any evidence for his position. However, since his claim goes beyond Irish to challenge deep-level orthometric interfacing in any and all languages, in the rest of this reply I will appeal to non-Irish evidence in attempting to show the weakness of his position. In particular, I will briefly review some of my work in Hebrew metre (§ 3) and Turkish rhyme (§4) – work cited by Manaster Ramer in his references but not addressed in the body of his paper (Malone 1982, 1983, 1988b).

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.

In the theory of articulatory phonology Browman & Goldstein (1986, 1990, 1992) claim that place assimilation is mainly the result of the overlap of gestures and the perception of these overlapping gestures as a single gesture. Ohala (1990) makes a similar claim. The present study provides interesting experimental evidence against this explanation of assimilation as a result of gestural overlap and resulting misperception, and for the importance of gestural reduction.

An issue which engaged the attention of phonologists following the publication of Halle & Vergnaud's ground-breaking Essay on stress (1987a) was the proper treatment of stress systems in which iterative foot structure is apparently required to locate the main prominence, yet expected secondary stresses are absent in the output. The solution proposed by Halle & Vergnaud was that unwanted secondary stresses are removed by a special repair mechanism, Conflation, accompanied by the automatic erasure of headless feet. The pattern which initially motivated the rule was found to exist in a very few languages: Cairene Arabic (Mitchell 1956, 1960, 1962; Langendoen 1968; McCarthy 1979; Stevens & Salib 1987), Seminole/Creek (Haas 1977; Jackson 1987; Tyhurst 1987) and possibly Palestinian Arabic (Brame 1973; Kenstowicz & Abdul-Karim 1980; Hayes 1995; inter al.).