Basic principles of generative phonology, as codified in SPE, and later developments within this framework, including metrical phonology, lexical phonology, autosegmental phonology, and underspecification theory. The role of cyclicity. The rise of Optimality Theory and the difficulties encountered in this framework in accounting for opaque relationships.

The authors compare approaches to studying the effects of the prosodic Principle of Rhythmic Alternation on the basis of two fundamentally different corpus formats. The first consists of orthographic transcriptions of speech, or of originally written data, while the other one provides access to the sound files of the spoken data, too. The authors’ main argument is that the nature and size of the corpus determines, or at least constrains, the range of methods that can be applied – and as a corollary of this, the findings that can be gained. Due to the greater availability and accessibility of written and transcribed spoken corpus data, much of the evidence in prior research is rather abstract and comes from large corpora accessed via the orthographic route only. Exploiting the recently available sound files of parts of the spoken section of the original British National Corpus, the authors analyse the data from an auditory perspective. This direct and highly controlled approach partially converges with and adds to the findings of previous studies. Thus, both approaches can be shown to complement each other, resulting in a better overall understanding of the phenomenon at hand.

Chapter Six examines several minor rules of Hebrew accents that are mainly related to deviations from the basic subdivison unit and stress crash. The simplification and division rules (deviations from the basic subdivision unit), the spirantization (sandhi) rule, and the nesiga rule (stress crash) are investigated. The simplification process usually occurs under three conditions: 1) when the disjunctive accent is a final disjunctive that may be replaced by a conjunctive, 2) when the domain of that final disjunctive consists of two words, and 3) when the final disjunctive immediately precedes its greater terminal disjunctive accents. The division process is in fact the opposite of the simplification process. A unit of two words with disjunctive accents results from a division process in which a disjunctive accent appears in place of a conjunctive accent. If a vowel-final word carries a disjunctive accent, spirantization does not occur because that disjunctive functions as a separator. However, if a vowel-end word carries a conjunctive accent, spirantization does occur. The nesiga rule is to retract the main stress on the first word when two accents appear adjacently.