Fungwa marks the diminutive by fronting non-high vowels of nominal roots and the augmentative by backing non-high vowels of nominal roots. The root-vowel mutation is considered to be an effect of diminutive and augmentative morphemes which have [―back] and [+back] features as their phonetic exponents. The form–meaning association of the morphemes is consistent with the pattern of sound-size symbolism in various languages. Thus Fungwa presents categorical and deterministic evidence for sound-size symbolism. To account for the realisation of the featural affixes, I assume featural correspondence constraints. Given that the featural affixes are not realised on high vowels, I argue that the realisation of the featural affixes involves a prominence-based licensing condition.

In this work, we address structural, iconic and social dimensions of the emergence of phonological systems in two emerging sign languages. A comparative analysis is conducted of data from a village sign language (Central Taurus Sign Language; CTSL) and a community sign language (Nicaraguan Sign Language; NSL). Both languages are approximately 50 years old, but the sizes and social structures of their respective communities are quite different. We find important differences between the two languages’ handshape inventories. CTSL's handshape inventory has changed more slowly than NSL's across the same time period. In addition, while the inventories of the two languages are of similar size, handshape complexity is higher in NSL than in CTSL. This work provides an example of the unique and important perspective that emerging sign languages offer regarding longstanding questions about how phonological systems emerge.

A'ingae (or Cofán) is a language isolate spoken in the Ecuadorian and Colombian Amazon. This study presents a description and analysis of the language's morphologically conditioned verbal stress assignment. Specifically, I show that A'ingae verbal morphemes can be classified with two binary parameters: the presence or absence of prestressing and the presence or absence of stress deletion (i.e. dominance), which vary independently. I formalise my analysis in Cophonology Theory, a non-representational theory of the phonology–morphology interface, which captures morpheme-specific phonology with constraint rankings particularised to morphological constructions. I argue that while non-representational approaches such as Cophonology Theory can handle the facts of A'ingae stress deletion straightforwardly, representational approaches lack the expressive power necessary to capture the stress facts of the language.

This paper develops a model of lenition in Campidanese Sardinian. The model treats lenition (and its inverse, fortition) as a predictable consequence of gradient changes in duration associated with prosodic structure. A more typical approach to lenition processes in Campidanese and other languages is to treat them as changes in phonological features. I show here that a phonetic model operating on the output of phonological computations avoids some of the analytical problems associated with such phonological analyses, unifies the phonetic and phonological description of lenition, and captures the relationship between prosody, lenition and duration. While the detailed simulations here are specific to Campidanese, I suggest that the model is broadly applicable to languages with intervocalic lenition processes such as voicing, spirantisation and tapping.

An acoustic experiment on final devoicing in Polish, aimed at providing new data on incomplete neutralisation, is described. The experiment was modelled on a study of German by Roettger et al. (2014), who mitigated possible effects of orthography by employing a word-formation task based on auditory stimuli, eliciting stop-final nonce words with underlying final voiced or voiceless stops. Our results provide some evidence for incomplete neutralisation in Polish, with an effect on closure duration, but not on preceding vowel duration, as well as interspeaker variation in the reliability of contrast maintenance. Considered against the background of studies from other languages, the results point to implementational differences in incomplete neutralisation effects as a function of laryngeal typology, which are accounted for in the Onset Prominence representational model.

While attested phonological mappings appear to be regular, Optimality Theory is known to implement more complex functions. This squib contributes to the computational characterisation of Optimality Theory by constructing a grammar that implements a non-pushdown function. By using only simple, familiar constraints, the result suggests that a large proportion of optimality-theoretic grammars are more powerful than necessary as models of phonology.