The past two decades have seen the development of several constraint-based models of phonological grammar that can handle variable phenomena. Most of these models, however, are purely grammatical, and do not allow for the contribution of non-grammatical factors towards determining the frequency structure of variation. This paper reviews different approaches to phonological variation, focusing on how grammatical and non-grammatical factors co-determine patterns of variation. Based on this review, a model is developed that incorporates influences from both grammatical and non-grammatical factors. The proposed model is grammar-dominant, in the sense that grammar defines the space of possible variation while non-grammatical factors only contribute towards the frequency with which the grammar determined forms are observed. Following Coetzee & Kawahara (2013), the model is developed in a version of noisy Harmonic Grammar that allows non-grammatical factors to scale the weights of faithfulness constraints up or down.

This paper establishes that unbounded circumambient processes, phonological processes for which crucial information in the environment may appear unboundedly far away on both sides of a target, are common in tonal phonology, but rare in segmental phonology. It then argues that this typological asymmetry is best characterised by positing that tone is more computationally complex than segmental phonology. The evidence for the asymmetry is based around attestations of unbounded tonal plateauing, but it is also shown how the ‘sour-grapes’ harmony pathology is unbounded circumambient. The paper argues that such processes are not weakly deterministic, which contrasts with previous typological work on segmental phonology. Positing that weak determinism bounds segmental phonology but not tonal phonology thus captures the typological asymmetry. It is also discussed why this explanation is superior to any offered by Optimality Theory.

In local optionality, an optional process may apply at some loci in a form but not at others. Some theories of optionality, such as Partial Orders Theory, produce optionality by making multiple strict constraint rankings available, and have been claimed to be incompatible with local optionality: if the process-triggering constraint outranks faithfulness, the process applies exhaustively; under the opposite ranking, it applies nowhere. On this view, candidates in which the process applies at some loci but not others are harmonically bounded. This paper argues against that position by showing that for a variety of locally optional processes each locus can be independently manipulated if the theory makes use of constraints that target particular prosodic or morphosyntactic units – constraints that are motivated independently of their utility in local optionality. The result is that, contrary to the harmonic-bounding argument, Partial Orders Theory can provide plausible accounts of local optionality.

This paper considers whether the phonology of the lexical pitch accent of Kyungsang Korean is being maintained by younger innovative speakers. We examine the pitch-accent patterns of nouns with various suffixes by comparing the speech of innovative Kyungsang speakers to that of older conservative speakers. It will be shown that while innovative speakers maintain the underlying distinction in the lexical pitch accent found with conservative speakers, the acoustic difference across the contrastive accent classes is substantially weaker in the speech of innovative speakers, for both noun stems and suffixes. Observation of individual differences in the phonetic realisation of the pitch accent and comparison with tonal patterns of Seoul Korean provide an insight into this sound change, offering evidence for how and why the acoustic distinction has weakened. This study thus documents a process of diachronic change in the prosody of Kyungsang Korean.

Varieties of Malay, including Indonesian, have been variously described as having word stress on the penultimate syllable, as having variable word stress and as having a phrase-final pitch accent without word stress. In Ambonese Malay, the alignment of sentence-final pitch peaks fails to support the existence of either word stress or phrase-final pitch accents. Also, the shape of its pitch peaks fails to vary systematically with the information status of the phrase-final word. The two intonation melodies of the language include phrase-final boundary-tone complexes which do not associate with any syllables. The declarative rise-fall would appear to be timed so as to occur within the last word of the sentence. Minimal stress pairs presented in earlier descriptions show a contrast between /a/ and a segmentally distinct weak /ă/, a contrast that also appears in positions that have not been claimed to have stress. A preliminary phonological analysis concludes the account.