The distribution of the feature [high] in Shona verbs is a prototypical example of positional neutralisation accompanied by vowel harmony. In languages which exhibit positional neutralisation of vowel contrasts, one or more vowels (generally, the most marked members of the vowel inventory) may occur distinctively in only a small subset of the structural positions available in the language. Outside of these positions, the marked vowels may surface only if they harmonise with a similar vowel in the privileged position. For example, the mid vowels e and o in Shona verbs are contrastive only in root-initial syllables. These vowels may appear in subsequent syllables only when preceded by a mid vowel in root-initial position. A string of height-harmonic Shona vowels is therefore firmly anchored in the root-initial syllable, as shown in (1):

If we compare the contrastive potential of different phonological contexts in any language, it usually does not take long to establish that the distributional spoils are unevenly divided. Each context typically displays its own subsystem of oppositions which may be bigger or smaller than those associated with other contexts (cf. Twaddell 1935). The traditional term NEUTRALISATION describes the relation between a defective subsystem and one that is distributionally better endowed.

The failure of a position to sustain a particular contrast can manifest itself in one of two ways, as Trubetzkoy was among the first to point out (1939: 209ff). Under ASSIMILATIVE NEUTRALISATION, the phonetic interpretation of the position with respect to the relevant contrast is determined by the melodic content of an adjacent position. This type of pattern is evident in vowel harmony, where the quality of a harmonising vowel is wholly or partially dependent on that of the dominant vowel within the domain. It is also to be seen in the assimilative suspension of consonantal contrasts. For example, in coda–onset interludes consisting of full or partial geminates, the phonetic interpretation of one position is wholly or partially dependent on that of the other.

REDUCTIVE NEUTRALISATION, on the other hand, refers to a situation in which restrictions on the melodic content of a position operate independently of contrasts in neighbouring positions. In vowel systems, for example, it is quite usual to find that the maximal inventory of oppositions is restricted to prosodically prominent nuclei, while shrunken subsystems of various shapes and sizes show up in weak positions. In its most extreme form, syncope, this results in a nuclear position being gutted of all melodic content. In the case of non-nuclear positions, contrastive potential can be curtailed by sonority sequencing constraints and by consonantal lenition processes which neutralise distinctions of manner (as in vocalisation and spirantisation) or place (as in debuccalisation).

Correspondence is a relation between one representation and another (McCarthy & Prince 1993, 1994, 1995). This relationship may be between an underlying or lexical representation and a surface representation, that is: Input–Output forms; or between surface forms such as a reduplicant and its base (McCarthy & Prince 1995) or other derivationally related pairs (see for example Benua 1995, McCarthy 1995, Kenstowicz 1996) – i.e. Output–Output. Correspondence constraints over related words in a paradigm ensure uniformity within the paradigm. In earlier theories this effect was ensured by the Strict Cycle Constraint, which forbade structure-changing operations except in immediately derived environments and thus ensured that most of the base word stayed the same in derivation. In this paper we show that correspondence between derivationally related output forms (Benua 1995) is essential for the proper analysis of vowel length in Warray, a language of Northern Australia spoken near Darwin, and superior to an account making use of cyclicity. Correspondence constraints ensuring identity between output forms explain the pattern of vowel length in nouns, predicting both where long vowels occur as well as the apparently anomalous appearance of short vowels where long vowels might be expected.

The representation of geminate consonants remains a controversial topic in phonological theory. In a skeletal theoretic approach, for example, a geminate is represented as bipositional: a single root node multiply linked to two skeletal positions, as in (1) (see e.g. Clements & Keyser 1983, Levin 1985).

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Conversely, in moraic theory, geminates are inherently moraic (see e.g. Hayes 1989, 1995, Davis 1994, 1996). Thus, an underlying geminate consonant differs from a single consonant of the same quality in terms of a mora, as shown in (2):

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It is noteworthy that evidence bearing on the representation of geminates has thus far come predominantly from the patterning of intervocalic geminates, where the first part of a geminate occurs in coda position. Discussion of syllable-initial geminates, on the other hand, has received little attention in the literature.

Athabaskan languages display a remarkable cross-language similarity, yet at the same time the languages of this family differ from each other in restricted ways. This unity and variety provide a useful laboratory for phonological and morphological research. In this paper, we suggest that a certain case of unity which has been analysed as phonologically and morphologically motivated requires a purely morphological analysis.

The case in question is the well-known verbal disyllabic minimality requirement, which has been variously analysed as satisfaction of a disyllabic verb template (Slave; Rice 1990), satisfaction of a monosyllabic prefix-based portmanteau ‘stem’ (Navajo; McDonough 1990, 1996) or the result of stray consonant syllabification in the Minimal Word domain in verbs (Ahtna; Causley 1994). However, when data from other languages of the family are brought into the picture, a different, family-wide analysis suggests itself.

In some languages, syllable weight depends exclusively on vowel length, while in others, coda consonants add weight to syllables. In this paper we assume that syllable weight is reflected in moraic structure, and that weight-bearing coda consonants are the exclusive dependents of a mora, while weightless consonants share a mora with the preceding vowel. We consider whether the durations of vowels and coda consonants reflect the distinction between a segment which occupies its own mora and a segment that shares a mora. We examine three patterns of coda weight, reflected in stress assignment: in Hindi, codas always contribute to syllable weight; in Malayalam, coda consonants are always weightless; and in Levantine Arabic, coda weight is contextually determined, with word-internal codas contributing to syllable weight following a short vowel, but weightless following a long vowel. These phonological patterns translate into different moraic representations of CVC and CVVC syllables across the different languages. We examine the durations of vowels and coda consonants in CV, CVC, CVV and CVVC syllables in Hindi, Malayalam and Levantine Arabic, and find that in all three languages, segments that we represent as mora-sharing are significantly shorter than segments that we represent as occupying an independent mora. The striking differences in durational patterns across the three languages correlate with the different moraic representations proposed on the basis of phonological patterning.

A fundamental observation of phonological theory is that, out of the rich sound signal of speech, a small subset of phonetic properties is contrastive in any given language. Standardly, this observation is captured by excluding the non-distinctive phonetic properties from some levels of representation, yielding an abstract categorical representation of the contrasts among the speech sounds. Universally non-contrastive features have generally been assumed to be unspecified throughout the phonological component; thus, for example, Keating (1984) and Lombardi (1991) have argued against inclusion of particular laryngeal features in phonological representation on the grounds that they are never contrastive. Language-particular non-contrastive features have generally been assumed to be unspecified only in underlying representation and early stages of the derivation (e.g. Kiparsky 1982, Archangeli 1984, 1988, Archangeli & Pulleyblank 1986, 1994, Steriade 1987, Clements 1988). Moreover, since the discovery of extensive language-particular gradient alternations, it has standardly been assumed that a subsequent phonetic component is needed, to fill in gradient and universally non-contrastive properties (e.g. Pierrehumbert 1980, Keating 1990; but see Pierrehumbert 1994 for an attack on this view of the phonetics–phonology interface). This model is schematised in Fig. 1.

Prosodification processes like syllabification and foot parsing are often limited to a particular morphological constituent; i.e. they do not apply across a morpheme boundary. Prince & Smolensky (1993) present a new interpretation of this phenomenon which identifies the edge of a morphological constituent, rather than the morphological constituent as such, as opaque to prosodification. On their view, the morphological boundedness of processes that erect metrical structure reflects the desire for a grammatical constituent edge to coincide with the edge of a prosodic constituent, formalised as ALIGN(GCat-Edge 1, PCat-Edge 1) in their theory. Since prosodification across a morpheme boundary results in a mismatch between the edges of a prosodic and a morphological constituent, it is blocked whenever alignment is obeyed.

In this paper I claim that not only prosodification processes but also feature spreading is subject to pressure from an alignment constraint, and so is avoided. The case in point is dorsal fricative assimilation in Modern Standard German. Dorsal fricative assimilation does not apply across a compound boundary or to the dorsal fricative of the diminutive suffix -chen, which, though morphologically a suffix, is prosodically a separate phonological word of German (Noske 1990, Iverson & Salmons 1992, Borowsky 1993, Wiese 1996). Bringing Itô & Mester's (in press) notion of crisp alignment to bear on the analysis, I argue that the application of fricative assimilation is constrained by CRISPEDGE(PrWd), which requires the prosodic word to have sharply defined boundaries. Since spreading from a word-final back vowel to the initial dorsal of the following word results in a blurred word edge, it is ruled out, because CRISPEDGE(PrWd) is ranked higher than the constraint governing spreading.

Syllable structure in Piro, an Arawakan language spoken in Eastern Peru, exhibits properties that are of considerable interest. First, Piro allows three-consonant clusters in the syllabic onset (Matteson 1965) but a vowel-deletion rule is blocked to avoid such clusters, which makes it difficult to simply attribute the blocking to well-formedness constraints on syllable structure (cf. Kisseberth 1970a, b). Second, the onset consonant clusters are not governed by the Sonority Sequencing Principle (Selkirk 1984a, Clements 1990). The fact that all consonants except the prevocalic ones are described by Matteson (1965) as syllabic seems to obviate the need to posit complex onsets. However, these syllabic consonants do not participate in any phonological rules, including word stress and phrase-level rhythmic rules. If they are considered extrasyllabic throughout the phonology, they become exceptions to our general conceptions of extra-prosodicity, stray erasure and prosodic licensing (Itô 1986, 1989), since numerous such extrasyllabic consonants are not at the peripheral position of a well-defined domain but persist to be present throughout the derivation. Third, loss of an onset or unsyllabified consonant can lead to compensatory lengthening (henceforth CL), contradicting the moraic conservation account of CL (Hock 1986, Hayes 1989). Fourth, as Piro has no underlying long segments nor evidence for a heavy closed syllable, it becomes a counterexample to the typological prediction that CL occurs only in languages that have a pre-existing vowel-length contrast (de Chene & Anderson 1979) or syllable-weight contrast (Hayes 1989).

Harmony is a phonological pattern in which a sequence of vowels and/or consonants must have the same specification for a particular feature, descriptively referred to as the harmonic feature. In the clear cases, whenever the harmonic feature occurs in a word, the expected manifestation of the harmony pattern is also encountered. For example, in Capanahua (Loos 1969) where [nasal] is the harmonic feature, a nasal consonant always shares nasality with a preceding sequence containing vowels, semivowels and/or laryngeals.

Linguistic sound systems necessarily possess contrastive values that are sufficiently distinct from one another that their individual characters may be learned by the listener. In this way, any given value in any given system fulfils its functional role of rendering forms distinct which differ in meaning. Articulatory, aerodynamic, acoustic and auditory constraints serve to mediate between such sound–meaning correspondences in non-trivial ways. Indeed, if it can be shown that the sound patterns of language are in part explainable by these physical systems, then students of linguistic sound systems would do well to study in detail the phonetic base. Consider an example case. Laryngeal gestures and supralaryngeal gestures are by and large articulatorily independent of each other. Thus, for example, a voiceless aspirated stop consists of an oral occlusion, cued by silence, as well as an articulatorily independent laryngeal abduction, cued by broadband noise. Were the phonetic realisation of these two gestures strictly simultaneous, the cues signalling the laryngeal abduction would not be perceived as such by the listener (*[ot]). A listener can tell that there is no voicing, but cannot recover more specific information regarding the state of the glottis during oral closure. Stated simply, the full closure here reduces the acoustic output to zero. With zero acoustic energy, no source information other than silence is transmitted to the listener. However, upon staggering the two gestures, the otherwise obscured information is rendered salient.

This paper deals with the domains of some phonological rules of Baule, a Bia language of the Central Tano group (Stewart 1989) spoken in Côte d'Ivoire, West Africa. Like the other languages in this group, Baule has phonological Low and High tones, and a Low tone lowers the register of following High tones – the phenomenon widely referred to as downdrift. But Baule is distinguished from other members of the Central Tano group (and, indeed, from other downdrifting languages that we have studied) in that, within specified domains, sequences of two or more High tones exhibit a rise in pitch over the sequence.

In this paper we show that the occurrence of the rising pattern over High-tone sequences helps to make a clear distinction in Baule between the prosodic word and the morphological word, in line with the results of Selkirk (1980), Nespor & Vogel (1986), Inkelas (1990) and others. We motivate the Baule prosodic word as a phonological constituent whose delimitation is based on the morphological word, but with modifications based on language-particular syntactic, morphological and phonological considerations. Baule prosodic words include, along with simple morphological words that are lexical items in the language, compounds, proper names, noun+adjective and noun+numeral constructions. Other prosodic words are formed by affixing monosyllabic elements (including pronouns, nouns and numerals) to adjacent lexical units.

Certain kinds of complex phenomena serve as testing and proving grounds in phonology as theories develop and change. Cases of what I will call CONFLICTING DIRECTIONALITY, exemplified by the stress pattern in Selkup (Ostyak-Samoyed) in (1), constitute one such phenomenon (Halle & Clements 1983, Idsardi 1992). This pattern, first discussed for Eastern Cheremis by Kiparsky (1973) (from Itkonen 1955), has informed all major theories of stress (Hayes 1981, 1995, Prince 1983, Halle & Vergnaud 1987, Kenstowicz 1995, Halle & Idsardi 1995, among others). Descriptively, in Selkup the rightmost heavy (CVV) syllable receives the stress (1a), but if the word contains no heavy syllables, it is the leftmost syllable which is stressed (1b). The term CONFLICTING DIRECTIONALITY describes this elsewhere relationship between the right and left edges of a word. No theory of stress is complete if it cannot account for this pattern.