Vowel duration is not contrastive in standard and regional varieties of Italian. However, vowels in stressed open syllables are longer than unstressed vowels or vowels in closed syllables. The increased duration is not equal in all positions. Most notably, the increased duration of a stressed open penultimate syllable is much greater than the duration of a stressed open antepenultimate syllable or a stressed final syllable, which has no noticeable duration increase. Nonetheless, phonological analyses of Italian have characterised length by a single rule (see for example Vogel 1986, Nespor & Vogel 1986) that lengthens non-final main stress vowels regardless of position. Phonetic studies, particularly Farnetani & Kori (1983, 1990) and Marotta (1985), pay closer attention to the duration of stressed vowels in different positions. Although their explanations of stressed vowel duration differ, the common theme is that duration differences are due to shortening vowels as a consequence of word compression or position (antepenultimate or penultimate syllable) in the word.

While the phonetic approaches account for differences in duration due to shortening, the phonological approaches propose lengthening with no regard for actual duration differences. The phonetic and phonological approaches to stressed vowel duration in Italian appear to be diametrically opposed. This paper proposes that lengthening a stressed vowel is the correct characterisation of duration differences in Italian, but there is no single rule that lengthens stressed vowels.

A number of recent papers have demonstrated the advantages of using a phonological model incorporating the timing and magnitude of articulatory gestures to account for alternations involving segments such as the English nasals, liquids and glides (e.g. Krakow 1989, Browman & Goldstein 1992, 1995, Sproat & Fujimura 1993, Gick, in press). Some of these works (McMahon et al. 1994, McMahon & Foulkes 1995) have made specific reference to the well-known phenomenon of English intrusive r, shown in (1).

formula here

However, previous analyses have not linked the intrusive r explicitly to other similar processes, nor viewed all of these processes as the natural results of more general principles of phonological organisation. Thus, the intrusive r has remained, in the eyes of most linguists, an isolated quirk of English history, or, as one phonologist (McCarthy 1993: 191) has called it, ‘the phonologically unnatural phenomenon of r-epenthesis’.

The present paper introduces into the discussion of intrusive r a recently documented related phenomenon known as intrusive l (Gick 1991, 1997, in preparation, Miller 1993). It is argued that these new facts, in conjunction with current advances in the understanding of articulatory factors in syllable structure, support a view in which the intrusive r and l are synchronically underlyingly present.

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.

Hume et al. (1997) argue that in Leti, an Austronesian language spoken on Leti Island off the coast of East Timor, geminate consonants are not moraic. In particular, they focus much of their attention on the word- initial geminates of Leti, which are syllable-initial when they begin a phrase. They argue that Leti initial geminates cannot be moraic and are instead best represented as in (1), with a single root node linked to two X- slots. (The example in (1) displays a syllable with an initial geminate; the vowel is moraic. The term root indicates the consonantal root node; the features under it are not indicated.)

While Hume et al. do not explicitly extend their discussion of the representation of initial geminates by examining relevant data in other languages, they do note (pp. 397–398) that ‘given the paucity of discussion in the phonological literature concerning syllable-initial geminates, the evidence from Leti is particularly important not only for further enriching our understanding of these segments but, in addition, for serving as a testing-ground for theories of prosodic structure and the representation of geminate consonants’. From this, one could postulate a strong position in which all initial geminates have the same, non-moraic, representation. The purpose of this squib is to argue against this strong position. While the evidence provided by Hume et al. against the moraic representation of Leti initial geminates is convincing, I present evidence in this paper showing that initial geminates are moraic in other languages. In § 2 I present data from Trukese previously discussed by Churchyard (1991), Hart (1991) and Davis & Torretta (1998) that provide a compelling case for the moraic representation of word-initial geminate consonants in that language. In § 3 I suggest that the different representations of word-initial geminates in Leti and Trukese are supported by the very different phonotactics of word-initial clusters found in the two languages. Finally, in § 4 I relate the discussion on initial geminates to the peculiar patterning of palatal segments in Italian, where palatals always surface as long except in phrase-initial position. I argue that the palatal segments in Italian are moraic even when surfacing in phrase-initial position. I conclude that initial geminates may be moraic in some languages but not in others.

The goals that Bernhardt & Stemberger set for themselves in this bookI would like to thank Todd Bailey, Barbara Bernhardt, Dan Dinnsen, Heather Goad, Sharon Hargus, Linda Lombardi, John McCarthy, Geoffrey Nathan, Elena Nicoladis, Alan Prince, Paul Smolensky, Joseph Stemberger and Wolf Wikeley for their comments on a draft of this review, and the Rutgers Optimality Archive (http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/roa.html) for facilitating its distribution. This work was supported by SSHRC research grant 410-98-1595, for which I am grateful. are extremely ambitious. Assuming only a very basic knowledge of phonological theory on the part of the reader, they aim to provide an introduction to non-linear phonology and to its constraint-based implementation in Optimality Theory, and to show how this framework can describe and illuminate a wide range of data on phonological development, as well as how the child data can inform theory construction. In doing this, they also present what they claim is a comprehensive inventory of the attested phenomena of child phonology, as well as a new proposal about the nature and range of possible constraints in Optimality Theory. The scope of the book is widened even further by the authors' use of data from children with both normal and delayed phonological development, and by their use of theoretical constructs drawn from literature on processing and connectionism. These ambitious and wide-ranging goals match the relatively large and diverse audience that Bernhardt & Stemberger hope to reach with this book: theoretical phonologists, researchers examining phonological development from various linguistic and psychological perspectives, and speech-language pathologists.

For its depth and breadth of theoretical and empirical coverage, this book will be of considerable value to anyone involved in phonological theory that has an interest in child phonology (although depending on one's circumstances, this value may or may not match the publisher's asking price of $149·95). As a phonologist working in Optimality Theory and acquisition, I was impressed with the extent to which the ideas, data and references to earlier work were new to me. I now turn to this book regularly to help answer questions about phonological development, both those that come up in my own research and those raised by colleagues and students.