Study of the phonology-syntax interface has typically proceeded by asking the following question: what aspects of syntactic structure are relevant for the application of phonological rules? Several years’ study of the question by a number of persons (e.g. Kaisse 1985; Selkirk 1984) suggests that phonological rules may be sensitive, either directly or indirectly, to the surface-syntactic constituent structure – typically through extension of the notion of government or c-command. Phrasal phonological rules do not appear to be sensitive to differences in grammatical relations (e.g. subject vs. object) unless these are encoded as different surface constituent structures. Nor do phrasal phonological rules (as opposed to lexical rules) appear to be sensitive to different syntactic features such as [±noun] or [±wh].

Ladd's Intonational phonology is a substantial addition to an area that has only recently ‘arrived’. Fortunately for the field of intonational phonology, the past two decades have seen a number of seminal contributions from phonologists, including Mark Liberman, Gösta Bruce, Janet Pierrehumbert and Ladd himself. Work on intonation, which has advanced in sync with modern linguistic theory, can also look back on quite a number of rather specific studies by phoneticians and rather general descriptive accounts by linguists and English teachers on this continent and in Europe.

The book's basic goal is to present the subject matter of intonational phonology to the non-specialist linguist. The material is not only summarised but also accompanied by critical comments. Ladd's goal of keeping the book accessible to the non-specialist may limit the depth of the presentation of the basic material and the definitiveness of the critical comments, but for many this will be a reasonable price to pay for breadth of coverage.

This paper investigates the nature of native Mandarin Chinese speakers’ phonotactic knowledge via an experimental study and formal modelling of the experimental results. Results from a phonological well-formedness judgement experiment suggest that Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge is sensitive not only to lexical statistics, but also to grammatical principles such as systematic and accidental phonotactic constraints, allophonic restrictions and segment–tone co-occurrence restrictions. We employ the UCLA Phonotactic Learner to model Mandarin speakers’ phonotactic knowledge, and compare the model's well-formedness predictions with speakers’ judgements. The disparity between the model's predictions and the well-formedness ratings from the experiment indicates that grammatical principles and the lexicon are still not sufficient to explain all of the variations in the speakers’ judgements. We argue that multiple biases, such as naturalness bias, allophony bias and suprasegmental bias, are effective during phonotactic learning.

Features are standard in segmental analysis but have been less successfully applied to tone. Subtonal features have even been argued to be less satisfactory for the representation of African tone than tonal primitives such as H, M, L (Hyman 2010; Clements et al. 2010). I argue that the two-feature system of Yip (1980) and Pulleyblank (1986) offers a straightforward account of the tonology of Laal, an endangered, three-tone isolate of southern Chad – in particular properties of the Mid tone that are otherwise difficult to account for, namely the avoidance of complex patterns involving M, and a pervasive M-to-L lowering process, both straightforwardly analysed as subtonal assimilation. Other tonal operations in Laal are shown to involve full-tone behaviour, justifying a tone geometry à la Snider (1999, 2020) where subtonal features are linked to a Tonal Root Node, giving tones the ability to be either fully or partially active, just like segments.

Modern Japanese has a set of morphophonemic alternations known collectively as rendaku that involve initial consonants in second elements of compounds, as in /jama+dera/ ‘mountain temple’ (cf. /tera/ ‘temple’). An alternating element like /tera/ ~ /dera/ has an initial voiced obstruent in its rendaku allomorph and an initial voiceless obstruent in its non-rendaku allomorph. Lyman's Law blocks rendaku in a second element containing a medial voiced obstruent. This paper gives three arguments that Lyman's Law originated as a constraint prohibiting prenasalisation in consecutive syllables. First, constraints on similar consonants in close proximity generally apply not to voicing but to features with phonetic cues that are more spread out, such as prenasalisation. Second, in some Japanese dialects with prenasalised voiced obstruents, rendaku cannot occur if it would result in adjacent syllables containing these marked consonants. Third, phonographically attested Old Japanese compounds are consistent with a constraint on adjacent syllables.

Based on primary data from Tundra Nenets, this paper explores phonological patterns which seem to require restrictions on the input, and thus present a particular challenge to Optimality Theory. In these patterns, a contrastive segment appears only in the environments where it is also derived by active alternations in the language. I illustrate this with the behaviour of Tundra Nenets /k/, and argue that these patterns can be analysed as distributional generalisations that hold only at early derivational levels. A Stratal OT analysis is proposed. Tundra Nenets also presents a pattern which appears to involve unnatural classes, but is reanalysed with only natural class alternations in my account.

This paper provides a description and an Optimality Theory analysis of the Japanese language game sakasa kotoba. This analysis contributes to the phonological study of language games, as sakasa kotoba constitutes a novel language game type: total mora reversal. In addition, our analysis contributes to the study of Japanese phonology, by providing evidence (i) for the mora, (ii) on the internal structure of the syllable in Japanese and (iii) on the representation of moras occurring in complex syllables, namely coda nasals, geminates and long vowels. The patterning of these moras suggests that the game manipulates intermediate representations, rather than underlying or surface forms. We propose a formal analysis within the framework of Stratal OT. The analysis uses a game-specific constraint to motivate reversal, with other aspects of game form shape determined through the interaction of markedness and faithfulness constraints.

Phonological coalescence, understood as a type of synchronic alternation in which two phonological elements seem to fuse into one, presents a prima facie challenge for versions of Optimality Theory that assume the principle of containment. If all underlying material has to be present in the output form, replacing two input elements with a single output element is not straightforward. I argue that, under the assumptions of Autosegmental Coloured Containment Theory, a distinct operation of coalescence is unnecessary, as all major types of coalescence patterns can be analysed in terms of (i) adding new association lines between some autosegmental nodes, and (ii) the underparsing of other nodes, leading to their phonetic non-realisation. The proposed analysis accurately reflects the heterogeneity of coalescence alternations, which are shown to fall into three different types.

It has been proposed that there are cognitive biases in language learning that favour certain patterns over others. This study examines the effects of such bias factors on the learning of the phonology of proper nouns. I take up the phenomenon of compound voicing in Japanese surnames. The results of two judgment experiments show that, while Japanese speakers replicate various kinds of statistical regularities in existing names, they tend to extend only phonologically motivated patterns to novel names. This suggests that phonological naturalness plays a role even in the learning of a highly faithful category of words, namely proper nouns, and provides evidence for the relevance of learning biases in synchronic grammar.

This article considers the question of what constitutes item-based morphology, with a specific look at grammatical tone. Numerous case studies of grammatical tone are examined in light of the debate on whether morphology is item-based or process-based. In each case, tonal alternations are an exponent, sometimes the sole exponent, of some grammatical feature. Two of the case studies are examples of grammatical tone that can straightforwardly be analysed as involving concatenated morphophonological forms; however, in other cases, the grammatical tone cannot be reduced to the concatenation of a tonal affix or phonological feature with some stem. The latter type cannot straightforwardly be analysed as item-based, but if still phonologically predictable and productive, is not satisfactorily analysed as suppletive. This article suggests a set of diagnostics that can be used to determine whether a given phenomenon is best analysed as item-based, process-based or suppletive. Then, an analysis is presented in Cophonologies by Phase (CbP), where morphosyntactic features can be mapped not only to underlying phonological items, but also to morpheme-specific constraint weight adjustments. CbP allows for what may have been traditionally called item-based and process-based morphology to co-exist in a single framework.

In this paper, I provide a unified account of three frequency effects in phonology. First, typologically marked elements are underrepresented. Second, phonological changes are underrepresented. Third, morphologically conditioned phonological changes are overrepresented. These effects are demonstrated with corpus data from English and Welsh. I show how all three effects follow from a simple conception of phonological complexity. Further, I demonstrate how this notion of complexity makes predictions about other phenomena in these languages, and that these predictions are borne out. I model this with traditional Optimality Theory, but the proposal is consistent with any constraint-based formalism that weights constraints in some way.

This thematic issue almost did not happen. One of us (JH) was almost killed two days after the deadline for article submissions. As a pedestrian on a sidewalk minding his own business, he was struck by a car that ran a red light and lost control after a collision. So when we write that we are delighted to be writing this introduction, over one year later, we both really mean it.