This paper presents a declarative analysis of the phonology of English auxiliaries. The strong and weak forms of auxiliary verbs in English have generally been treated as either related derivationally (Zwicky 1970, Wood 1979, Selkirk 1984) or as lexically suppletive items (Kaisse 1985; this view is also implicit in traditional treatments of English phonetics, e.g. Jones 1960). The derivational treatment involves destructive processes, which Declarative Phonology eschews (Bird 1995, Coleman 1995). The treatment as separate lexical entries fails to address the commonalities observable in related forms such as [hav hbv bv v] for have. This paper provides a declarative analysis of the relations between the multiple forms of English auxiliaries without derivation, and without suppletion. The analysis is based on a corpus as well as data from informants, and is formalised using a computationally tractable formalism. Many of the examples cited in the paper are taken from marsec (Roach et al. 1993), a machine-readable English corpus of material taken from BBC radio broadcasts during the 1980s. The dominant variety of English in marsec is ‘standard’, although in reality this merely means that there is a variety of accents represented which tend towards RP. The database provides natural material rather than idealised or specifically elicited material. As Rischel (1992: 381) notes: ‘Phonology has been based on very exaggerated idealisations about the power of rule machinery as the format in which to take care of variation’. However, some of the structures needed in the analysis presented in this paper do not occur in marsec, so the natural material is complemented by material based on native informants.

This paper examines the cues for and interaction between the metrical and tonal systems of Kera. Kera has no word-level stress, but the heads of its quantity-sensitive iambic feet are cued by duration, intensity and vowel allophony; in addition, foot boundaries are identified by vowel-harmony and tone-spreading domains. The tonal system has three underlying tones, which are enhanced by differences in voice onset time (VOT). Kera demonstrates an interaction between the iambic foot and tone. Words have one or two tones. For words of three or more syllables the tone-bearing unit is the foot, but for shorter words it is the syllable. This dichotomy is accounted for by a faithfulness constraint requiring all tones to surface, which overrides a constraint limiting each foot to one tone. Kera shows that a tonal system can be sensitive to metrical structure, while maintaining a certain independence between the two systems.

I propose that the notions of segment and phoneme be enriched to allow some concurrent clustering, even in classical theories. My main application is the Khoisan language !Xóõ, where treating clicks as phonemes concurrent with phonemic accompaniments allows the inventory size to be radically reduced, so solving the problems of many unsupported contrasts. I show also how phonological processes of !Xóõ can be described more elegantly in this setting, with support from metalinguistic evidence and production-task experiments. I describe a new allophony in !Xóõ. I go on to discuss other applications, some rather speculative, of the concept of concurrent phoneme. The article also provides a comprehensive review of the segmental phonetics and phonology of !Xóõ, together with previous analyses.

For any phonotactic restriction on syllable onsets and codas, it can be shown that parallel restrictions are attested at edges of each higher prosodic domain. Onsets can be required at the beginnings of syllables, words or utterances, codas can be banned at the ends of any of these constituents and so on. This paper argues that these restrictions follow from constraint schemata: any markedness constraint on syllable onsets or codas (MOns or MCoda) is part of a family of constraints (MOns(Ons/PCat) or MCoda(Coda/PCat)) which imposes parallel restrictions on initial onsets or final codas of each prosodic domain. These prosodic domain-edge markedness constraints can induce epenthesis, deletion or other segmental changes at domain edges; they can also shape the prosodic structure of words.

Nubi is a language with culminative word prominence, spoken in Uganda and Kenya. The prominence, or accent, falls within a right-edge three-syllable window, and at the phrasal level deaccenting and rhythm-related accent shift occur in specific phonological and morphological contexts. Since accent is used to express morphological categories, and deaccenting and accent shift are morphologically conditioned, the functional load of accent is comparable to that of morphologically conditioned stress in other languages. Accented syllables are associated with H tones, with default L tones appearing between them. Typologically, Nubi is not a stress-accent language, because unlike for example English, it has no stress distinctions independently of the distinction between accented and unaccented syllables. It is also non-tonal, because accent marking is not lexically idiosyncratic, and because it has no option other than to supply a H tone is accented syllables, it is unlike a prototypical intonation language that has pitch accents with discoursal meanings.

What influence do syntax and phonology have on one another ? Two types of answer to this question appear in the literature. The consensus view is probably best expressed by Zwicky & Pullum (1986) (see also Myers 1987; Vogel & Kenesei 1990), who claim that the relation is one-way: although phonological phrasing above the word is affected by syntactic structure, syntax itself is phonology-free.

In this squib we introduce new language data into the debate concerning the markedness of place of articulation. The data illustrate a process of assimilation in Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole where coronal patterns as more marked than both labial and dorsal. Labial unmarkedness is further supported by the feature's asymmetrical patterning in consonant deletion as well as its distribution and frequency. The patterns are of particular significance since they provide a clear example of a language in which labial patterns as unmarked, thus leading us to the conclusion that there is no single, universal unmarked place of articulation. Implications of the Sri Lankan Portuguese Creole pattern for structure- and constraint-based accounts of markedness are discussed.

This article argues that, contrary to some recent proposals, a given phonological form may be organised into at most one array of metrical structure at a time. The bulk of the paper is dedicated to a case study of Huariapano, a language that has been claimed to motivate multiple, coexisting but autonomous, layers of metrical parsing. I show that this conclusion is premature: both stress and segmental patterning in Huariapano can be modelled within a single system of constituency, once context-dependent variation in foot form is taken into account. The reanalysis developed here also draws on the idea that foot-initial syllables may be targeted by augmentation or fortition processes even when unstressed. Independent evidence for foot-initial strengthening is furnished by segmental phonotactics in a range of other languages.

Franconian has a contrast between two tone accents, commonly referred to as Accent 1 and Accent 2. Traditional autosegmental analyses of the phenomenon suggest that this opposition derives from the presence of lexical tone. In contrast to this ‘tonal approach’, I argue that the Franconian accent contrast is based on contrastive foot structure – there is no tone in the lexicon. This ‘metrical approach’ not only accounts for the tonal differences between the accents, but also captures a variety of facts that are hard to incorporate into a synchronic tonal analysis, involving morphological alternations between Accent 1 and Accent 2, as well as the effects of vowel duration, vowel quality and consonant quality on accent-class membership. The metrical analysis of these patterns is in line with similar approaches to tone-accent contrasts in North Germanic and Scottish Gaelic.

One of the principal innovations of metrical stress theory is the claim that stress involves not merely a set of diacritics indicating the relative prominence of the syllables of a word but the construction of a constituent, the stress foot. As a constituent, the stress foot not only plays a role in the placement of stress but is also available to condition other phonological and morphological processes. Although the existence of the stress foot is now widely accepted and a variety of examples have been put forward showing the existence of such constituents and their role in processes other than stress placement, such examples are still not common, and languages in which the stress foot subserves a number of different processes are not well-attested.

Substance-based phonological theories predict that a preference for phonetically natural rules (those which reflect constraints on speech production and perception) is encoded in synchronic grammars, and translates into learning biases. Some previous work has shown evidence for such biases, but methodological concerns with these studies mean that the question warrants further investigation. We revisit this issue by focusing on the learning of palatal vowel harmony (phonetically natural) compared to disharmony (phonetically unnatural). In addition, we investigate the role of memory consolidation during sleep on rule learning. We use an artificial language learning paradigm with two test phases separated by twelve hours. We observe a robust effect of phonetic naturalness: vowel harmony is learned better than vowel disharmony. For both rules, performance remains stable after twelve hours, regardless of the presence or absence of sleep.

If an epenthetic vowel is required for syllable structure reasons, its position in a string may be determined by ‘directionality’, with the construction of maximal syllables beginning from a word edge (Itô 1986, 1989, Farwaneh 1995). Arabic has served as the prime example of directionality, but other Semitic languages have also played a role, such as Harari (Kenstowicz & Kisseberth 1979, Itô 1986) and Tigrinya (Denais 1990, Berhane 1991). In these languages the sonority of heterosyllabic (coda–onset) consonant sequences neither conditions insertion nor affects the site of the epenthetic vowel. Epenthesis is triggered by constraints on maximal syllable size, and the position of the epenthetic vowel is determined by directionality. As a result, violations of SYLLABLE CONTACT abound. Syllable contact can be defined as the requirement that a coda be more sonorous than a following onset (Murray & Vennemann 1983, Vennemann 1988).

In this article, I provide new data from Chaha, an Ethiopian Semitic language of the Gurage family, which demonstrate an intriguing difference from Semitic languages such as Harari, Tigrinya and Arabic.

Research in moraic phonology has generally assumed that a single representation is sufficient to account for all phonological rules dependent on moraic structure (Hock 1984; Hyman 1984, 1985; McCarthy & Prince 1986; Zec 1988; Hayes 1989). Thus, if a CVC syllable has the moraic structure in (1), all phonological rules will treat it as bimoraic. I term this the MORAIC UNIQUENESS HYPOTHESIS: at any given stage of a derivation, there is only one moraic projection.

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).

Avoidance of adjacent consonants that are ‘sufficiently identical’ – that is, identical except for possible differences in a small subset of specific features – is argued to result from joint satisfaction of a constraint against geminates (identical adjacent consonants) and other active constraints that independently require assimilation with respect to those features ignored in the determination of identity. The crux of the proposal is the dependence of antigemination on independent assimilation processes, a prediction that is independently verified in case studies from English and Lithuanian. The factorial typology of constraints at the core of the proposal is demonstrated to closely fit a significant range of observed cases.

The word prosody of the dialect of Cologne includes a phonological contrast in stressed syllables which at first sight might either reflect a ternary quantity contrast or a binary quantity contrast plus a tone contrast. There are differences in duration as well as F0 between Accent 1 (Schärfung) and Accent 2, along with differences in the intensity profiles of the syllables. It is argued that the contrast is one between an unspecified lexical tone (T) (Accent 2) and no tone (Accent 1), and that the lexical tone assimilates to an intonational tone. We show that a ternary quantity contrast (i) cannot capture the difference between Accent 1 and Accent 2; (ii) would imply an otherwise unattested distributional confinement to the syllable coda of geminate consonants and (iii) would imply unexpected intonation contours in bimoraic syllables. By contrast, a tonal analysis readily accounts for the phonetic and distributional facts.

There are currently many proposals for analysing cross-linguistic vowel length and consonant weight patterns within an Optimality Theory (OT) framework. The basic claim is that vowel length and consonant weight are determined by the interaction of markedness constraints on moraic content and constraints requiring faithfulness to underlying moraicity.

In this paper, I will show how the constraints used in one such proposal (Morén 1999) provide an analysis of the core syllable weight of Kashmiri, and that the inclusion of several other constraints proposed in the literature allows us to account for the previously puzzling distribution of stress in this language. Besides the empirical importance of both providing an analysis of Kashmiri stress and weight and demonstrating a language type predicted by Morén's weight typology, an added theoretical point is the demonstration that closed syllables may vary in weight depending on surface stress assignment. This is in line with work of Kager (1989), Hayes (1995), Rice (1996) and Broselow et al. (1997), but in contrast with many other theories which treat consonant weight for a particular segment in a given syllabic position as static within a given language. Further, the OT analysis presented here provides the necessary tools to allow the expression of weight hierarchies, while maintaining the restrictive theory of weight offered by a single-tiered moraic approach.

This paper explores a correlation between phonology and phonetics. It first reviews a phonological analysis that proposes that all full Mandarin rhymes are heavy and that all Shanghai rhymes are underlyingly light. Then it reports a small phonetic experiment that attempts to determine whether there is a phonetic correlate for the phonological claim. Four Mandarin speakers and five Shanghai speakers were recorded, each reading five sentences four times at normal speed. Average syllable durations were determined. It was found that the average syllable duration in Mandarin was 215 ms and that in Shanghai was 162 ms. Statistics show that the durational difference is significant. The result thus agrees with the phonological analysis. Implications and limitations of the present study will be discussed.

The issue of vowel height harmony – relatively rare in the world's languages – is one that most serious theories of phonology have addressed at one time or another, particularly as concerns its realisation in Bantu (e.g. Clements 1991, Archangeli & Pulleyblank 1994, Beckman 1997). As is quite well known, the majority of an estimated 500 Bantu languages exhibit some variant of a progressive harmony process by which vowels lower when preceded by an appropriate (lower) trigger. (Ki)-Yaka, a Western Bantu language spoken in ex-Zaire, designated as H.31 by Guthrie (1967–71), has a height harmony system which has been analysed as having a similar left-to-right lowering process. In this paper I argue against the general analysis given for Yaka, showing that this language differs in a major way from the rest of Bantu. The goals of the paper are threefold. First, I present a comprehensive treatment of the unusual vowel harmony system in (ki-)Yaka. Second, I introduce the notion of the ‘prosodic trough’ (τ), a domain which is needed in order to state important phonological generalisations in Yaka and in Bantu in general. Finally, I show the relevance of the Yaka facts for the study of positional prominence in phonology. A (partial) analysis is offered within optimality- theoretic terms, particularly as developed by McCarthy & Prince (1995). Although superficially resembling the vowel height harmony found in most Bantu languages, the Yaka system will be shown to differ from these latter in major ways. The paper is organised as follows. In §2 I establish the general nature of the Yaka harmony system, reanalysing previous accounts in terms of ‘plateauing’. In §3 I turn to the process of ‘imbrication’, which introduces a second motivation for vowel harmony: the avoidance of the sequence [wi]. A third source of vowel harmony is presented in §4, which also introduces the notion of the ‘prosodic trough’. The study ends with a brief conclusion in §5 and an appendix that discusses outstanding problems.

In Classical Arabic and many modern Arabic dialects, syllables ending in VVC or in the left leg of a geminate have a special status. An examination of Kiparsky's (2003) semisyllable account of syllabification types and related phenomena in Arabic against a wider set of data shows that while this account explains much syllable-related variation, certain phenomena cannot be captured, and several dialects appear to exhibit conflicting syllable-related phenomena. Phenomena not readily covered by the semisyllable account commonly involve long segments – long vowels or geminate consonants. In this paper, I propose for relevant dialects a mora-sharing solution that recognises the special status of syllables incorporating long segments. Such a mora-sharing solution is not new, but has been proposed for the analysis of syllables containing long segments in a number of languages, including Arabic (Broselow 1992, Broselow et al.1995), Malayalam, Hindi (Broselow et al.1997) and Bantu languages (Maddieson 1993, Hubbard 1995).