Chapter 2 discusses some of the most salient and yet persistently controversial and significant phenomena in Korean phonology: lenis obstruent voicing, stop neutralization, consonant cluster simplification, consonant assimilation, consonantal fortition, Saisiot, vowel deletion and insertion, vowel devoicing and assimilation, monophthongization, vowel harmony, and sound symbolism. The chapter focuses on the Seoul Standard Dialect. One salient and recurrent theme is the theoretical issue of the relative strength of each sound, both inherent and in its environment. Some sounds are held to be “stronger” than others; we see that these sounds are exploited not only in sound symbolism but also in the application or non-application of certain rules. Boundaries play a significant role in Korean phonology and are analyzed as prosodic units in contemporary analyses. The Korean-specific basis of articulation, particularly obligatory unreleasing, results in many interesting weakening effects, including consonant cluster simplification, various assimilatory phenomena, and various consonant and vowel insertions by backward generalizations.

This chapter on Romance phonology reviews several phenomena that can be qualified as typologically rare. Some of the phenomena examined are rarely documented within Romance but are relatively common in other language families, while others are hardly attested in the world’s languages but are present to some degree in Romance. Their relative frequency across languages and geographical distribution have been assessed with the help of three online databases that are publicly available: PHOIBLE, WALS, and the World Phonotactics Database. In addition, the challenges that these phenomena represent for phonological theory are also briefly considered. The topics examined in this chapter concern (i) phoneme inventories; (ii) syllable structure, with a focus on consonantal clusters; (iii) segmental processes involving glides, nasal place neutralization, lenition and fortition, and metathesis, among others; and (iv) issues at the morphology–phonology interface involving suprasegmentals.

Since its beginnings, phonological research has sought to discover constants below the phonetic flow associated with the linguistic expressions produced by speakers. Saussurean distinctiveness as the core property of phonemic units in European structuralism on a par with the functional criteria at the base of American phonemics have led to an interpretation of phonological phenomena in terms of distributional constraints on the phonetic segments, placing them in relation to some abstract level. We argue for the inadequacy of this approach in order to interpret the relation between lexical properties and the mapping onto the sensory-motor level. Specifically, the main formal requirements such as linearity, invariance, and biuniqueness of structural phonemics are called into question by the fact that harmonies, metaphonies, and other phonetic mechanisms provided by Romance systems escape such procedures and require a more powerful theory involving a cognitive level of organization. In fact, the speaker is able to master very complex phonological knowledge, including processes neutralizing underlying differences and types of overlapping, for which the notion of phoneme is of no use. On the contrary, these processes support an analysis in which lexical representations are connected to surface occurrences by rules and derivations as a part of the language capacity.

Drawing from a wide range of standard and nonstandard Germanic varieties past and present, this chapter examines the contrast between sounds traditionally written as <p, t, k, f, s> etc. and those written as <b, d, g, v, z>, etc. Following ‘Laryngeal Realism’, two main systems within Germanic are identified: [spread glottis] or Glottal Width languages like Icelandic, German and English on the one hand and [voice] or Glottal Tension languages like Dutch, Frisian and Yiddish on the other. The two differ phonetically — notably by aspiration of /p, t, k/ in the former and robust glottal pulsing of /b, d, g/ in the latter — but more importantly in terms of phonological activity. For instance, [spread] languages show progressive laryngeal assimilation while [voice] ones show regressive assimilation. Both types can neutralize the distinction in coda or word-final position. A few Germanic varieties have lost a laryngeal distinction and others have transformed the distinction into a contrast based on length.