This chapter covers the general features of the Homeric hexameter and the most famous debates therein, before asking the more general question as to what was the usefulness of meter for oral-traditional poets. Section 1 introduces the metrical scheme of the hexameter (including incisions and bridges), the principles of scansion and syllabification. Section 2 explores the colometry of the hexameter, and introduces the prosodic hierarchy. It also employs intonational data to argue tha the Homeric hexameter coincided with an intonational phrase, and its cola mostly with phonological phrases, and provides a new prosodic account of enjambement in Homer. Section 3 covers previous attempt at establishing the historical origin of the hexameter, arguing that the account of Kiparsky 2018 is the most promising. Section 4 looks at the speech of professional sportscasters, and argues that it shows several types of prosodic regularization that is akin to a basic type of meter. Extensive prosodic regularization diminishes the options available to a speaker, making it easier to sustain high levels of fluency. Meter arguably fulfilled a similar task in oral-traditional composition in performance.

The use of prosodic categories gives a clearer understanding of the intonation of utterancesthan the syntactic structure that was assumed in SPE. The prosodic hierarchy includes eight categories from the highest (the phonological utterance)through the intermediate cateories (intonation phrase, phonological phrase, clitic group, phonological word, foot, syllable) to the lowest (the mora). Each unit consists exclusively of units of the next lower category, though certain derived structures are possible with nesting, as when a syllable is adjoined to a foot. In that case the original foot is a constituent of the derived larger foot and a sister to the adjoined syllable. Exemplification of segmental rules that apply in terms of each prosodic category from English and other languages. The three highest units can sometimes be restructured, either broken into smaller units or combined into a larger unit. Summary of the postlexical rules.

This chapter provides an introductory overview of the phonological systems used in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with an overview of the various systems of consonants and vowels that are found, and the phonotactic principles by which those segments are combined to form syllables. The closely-related phenomena of register and tone are then introduced and defined, followed by an outline of the processes of tonogenesis, by which a language can develop a tone system. The chapter closes with a discussion of further aspects of the area’s sound systems, including tone sandhi, intonation, the prosodic hierarchy and criteria for different notions of ‘word’.

In this chapter, the ways that sign language phonology and prosodic structure interface with the other components of the grammar will be described, including how the nondominant hand interacts with morpho-syntactic and prosodic constituency. The most novel of the interfaces that will be discussed in this chapter will be the gesture–language interface, but the phonetics–phonology, morphology–phonology, and syntax/semantics–phonology interfaces will be discussed as well. This chapter also describes the details of higher-order prosodic structure not defined in earlier chapters – the phonological word (P-word; also referred to as the prosodic word), phonological phrase (P-phrase), and intonational phrase (I-phrase) – and provides evidence for prosody as independent from the rest of the grammar. This is of paramount importance because, in addition to showing how various components are interconnected, mismatches among different autonomous components of the grammar are one way we know that those components exist.

In this chapter, issues concerning the emergence of phonology will be addressed by tracing the paths of phonology and morphophonology as they move from gesture, to homesign, and across multiple stages in cohorts (or generations) of young sign languages. The material covered in the first four chapters of this volume will provide theoretical context for the emergence of phonology. Relevant work on spoken languages, which has observed and modeled processes of emergence or mapped them typologically, will be discussed, and some of the principles of phonological systems will be articulated, such as paradigm uniformity, conventionalization, symmetry of the phonological inventory, and well-formedness constraints on phonological constituents. Based on ongoing work we can also address some of the social factors that may be important in different rates of emergence in different social contexts or “language ecologies.”