Bøker i Phonology and Phonetics [PP]-serien

The book includes a selection of articles by Morris Halle dealing with issues in the theory and practice of phonetics and phonology. The articles, written in the course of the last forty years, concern matters that remain to this day at the cutting edge of the discipline.

This volume contains a collection of papers that address issues in Spanish phonology from the perspective of laboratory phonology. While volumes on Spanish phonology have been published in the past, never has one of these volumes dedicated itself exclusively to experimental studies. This volumenot only presents current experimental research on Spanish phonology, but alsorepresents the variety of issues in Spanish phonology that can be addressed experimentally and the numerous types of experimentation that can be used to further our understanding of phonological issues. The issues addressed by the studies in this volume include stress placement, rhotics, lexical storage, acquisition of sociolinguistic variables, and epenthesis by Spanish speakers learning English as a second language. Experimental approaches include traditional production experiments, perception experiments, computational modelling, and variationist methods. This variety, both in terms of issues covered and experimental approaches, ensures that this unique volume is representative of the breadth of work that is being conducted on Spanish phonology from experimental perspectives. While this volume is aimed principally at linguists working on, or interested in, Spanish phonology, it will also be of use to a variety of readers. This volume will also be of interest to phonologists, phoneticians, cognitive scientists, and others who may be interested in the contributions that empirical research can make to the study of phonology. Professional linguists as well as graduate students will find this volume to be an important addition to their library.

Covers phenomena that extend over stretches of segmental and featural units that must be examined with respect to their interaction with other features. These papers deal with a range of subjects, from intonational prominence and prosodic phrasing to the acoustic properties of segments and features.

This thorough study of the expression of contrast in the world's vowel systems examines phonetic and phonological differences between so-called strong and weak positions, bringing the full range of data from positional neutralization systems to bear on central questions at the interface between phonetics and phonology. The author draws evidence from a diverse array of sources, bringing together cross-linguistic typological surveys, detailed investigations of the diachrony of specific languages (Slavic, Turkic, Uralic, Austronesian, among many others) and original studies in experimental phonetics. Devoted at once to empirical coverage and to theoretical investigation, this is the first work to compile so exhaustive a study of positional neutralization patterns in the languages of the world. On the basis of this catalog of evidence, the author argues for a diachronically oriented approach to the phonetic motivations behind phonological patterns, with phonologization as its central mechanism. Three pairs of traditionally-identified strong and weak positions for the realization of vowel contrasts are selected and examined in detail: stressed and unstressed syllables, domain final and non-final syllables, and domain initial and non-initial syllables. Neutralization patterns in each position are extracted from survey data, and analyzed in light of the phonetic characteristics of each pair of positions. Both the nature of the patterns identified as well as the variety and sources of exceptions have important consequences for formal phonology, phonetics, and historical linguistics as well.