Features are standard in segmental analysis but have been less successfully applied to tone. Subtonal features have even been argued to be less satisfactory for the representation of African tone than tonal primitives such as H, M, L (Hyman 2010; Clements et al. 2010). I argue that the two-feature system of Yip (1980) and Pulleyblank (1986) offers a straightforward account of the tonology of Laal, an endangered, three-tone isolate of southern Chad – in particular properties of the Mid tone that are otherwise difficult to account for, namely the avoidance of complex patterns involving M, and a pervasive M-to-L lowering process, both straightforwardly analysed as subtonal assimilation. Other tonal operations in Laal are shown to involve full-tone behaviour, justifying a tone geometry à la Snider (1999, 2020) where subtonal features are linked to a Tonal Root Node, giving tones the ability to be either fully or partially active, just like segments.

This paper provides new evidence in support of the hypothesis that the syntax–prosody mapping of Intonational Phrases is flexible (Hamlaoui and Szendrői 2015). In the traditional ‘rigid’ approaches, Intonational Phrases are taken to map onto particular syntactic projections. In contrast, in the ‘flexible’ approach, the Intonational Phrase corresponds to the highest projection of the verb (HVP). Accordingly, the ‘flexible’ approach predicts that the HVP should also determine the size of Intonational Phrases in a language where the verb height depends on the utterance type. Our evidence comes from a language of this type, Iron Ossetic (East Iranian). First, we demonstrate that verbs in Iron Ossetic occupy different functional heads in different contexts. Then, based on novel prosodic data, we show that the HVP indeed directly determines the size of Intonational Phrases in clauses with narrow foci and negative indefinites. Additionally, in wh-questions, language-specific mapping constraints come into play.

This paper develops a theory of footing in Harmonic Serialism (HS; Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004; McCarthy 2000, 2016) where Con contains only directionally evaluated constraints (Eisner 2000, 2002; Lamont 2019, 2022a, 2022b). Directional constraints harmonically order candidates by the location of violations rather than the total number of violations. A central result of adopting directional evaluation is that the constraint Parse($\sigma$) not only motivates iterative footing but also determines where feet surface. This obviates the need for alignment constraints (McCarthy & Prince 1993; McCarthy 2003; Hyde 2012a, 2016), which determine where feet are parsed in HS with constraints that count loci (Pruitt 2010, 2012). The theory uses fewer constraints, is empirically adequate, and makes more restrictive predictions than HS with counting constraints and parallel Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993/2004) with directional constraints.

This paper presents both distributional and acoustic phonetic evidence for iambic stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné (ISO: CHP), a Dene (Athapaskan) language with contrastive vowel length and four contrastive tones. In our acoustic study, we find that the primary correlate of stress in Tetsǫ́t'ıné is duration, whereas intensity plays a secondary but statistically significant role. There was no statistically significant effect on F0 in our results. We discuss our results in relation to several proposals regarding the typology of stress systems. Based on the Functional Load Hypothesis (Berinstein 1979) and Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995, 2001), we find that our results are to some extent unexpected. We suggest that our results are most consistent with the Iambic–Trochaic Law (Hayes 1995), which predicts that iambic stress systems prefer to use duration as their primary stress correlate.

Primary word stress is typologically diverse. In some languages, the metrical structure of a word predicts the location of primary stress, while in other languages it does not. This diversity is considered through the lens of Harmonic Serialism (HS), a serial constraint-based theory, and it is argued that HS must incorporate a limited degree of parallelism to capture the typology. Namely, primary-stress assignment is simultaneous with foot-building and also mobile, being (re)assessed throughout a metrical derivation. But incorporating this parallelism into HS is both possible and desirable: the positive typological consequences of HS are preserved, and the implied formal divergence between the prosodic word and the foot with respect to parallelism echoes a fundamental distinction that is visible in a wide range of extant theoretical and empirical findings.

An acoustic experiment on final devoicing in Polish, aimed at providing new data on incomplete neutralisation, is described. The experiment was modelled on a study of German by Roettger et al. (2014), who mitigated possible effects of orthography by employing a word-formation task based on auditory stimuli, eliciting stop-final nonce words with underlying final voiced or voiceless stops. Our results provide some evidence for incomplete neutralisation in Polish, with an effect on closure duration, but not on preceding vowel duration, as well as interspeaker variation in the reliability of contrast maintenance. Considered against the background of studies from other languages, the results point to implementational differences in incomplete neutralisation effects as a function of laryngeal typology, which are accounted for in the Onset Prominence representational model.

While attested phonological mappings appear to be regular, Optimality Theory is known to implement more complex functions. This squib contributes to the computational characterisation of Optimality Theory by constructing a grammar that implements a non-pushdown function. By using only simple, familiar constraints, the result suggests that a large proportion of optimality-theoretic grammars are more powerful than necessary as models of phonology.

A'ingae (or Cofán) is a language isolate spoken in the Ecuadorian and Colombian Amazon. This study presents a description and analysis of the language's morphologically conditioned verbal stress assignment. Specifically, I show that A'ingae verbal morphemes can be classified with two binary parameters: the presence or absence of prestressing and the presence or absence of stress deletion (i.e. dominance), which vary independently. I formalise my analysis in Cophonology Theory, a non-representational theory of the phonology–morphology interface, which captures morpheme-specific phonology with constraint rankings particularised to morphological constructions. I argue that while non-representational approaches such as Cophonology Theory can handle the facts of A'ingae stress deletion straightforwardly, representational approaches lack the expressive power necessary to capture the stress facts of the language.

This paper develops a model of lenition in Campidanese Sardinian. The model treats lenition (and its inverse, fortition) as a predictable consequence of gradient changes in duration associated with prosodic structure. A more typical approach to lenition processes in Campidanese and other languages is to treat them as changes in phonological features. I show here that a phonetic model operating on the output of phonological computations avoids some of the analytical problems associated with such phonological analyses, unifies the phonetic and phonological description of lenition, and captures the relationship between prosody, lenition and duration. While the detailed simulations here are specific to Campidanese, I suggest that the model is broadly applicable to languages with intervocalic lenition processes such as voicing, spirantisation and tapping.

In this work, we address structural, iconic and social dimensions of the emergence of phonological systems in two emerging sign languages. A comparative analysis is conducted of data from a village sign language (Central Taurus Sign Language; CTSL) and a community sign language (Nicaraguan Sign Language; NSL). Both languages are approximately 50 years old, but the sizes and social structures of their respective communities are quite different. We find important differences between the two languages’ handshape inventories. CTSL's handshape inventory has changed more slowly than NSL's across the same time period. In addition, while the inventories of the two languages are of similar size, handshape complexity is higher in NSL than in CTSL. This work provides an example of the unique and important perspective that emerging sign languages offer regarding longstanding questions about how phonological systems emerge.

Fungwa marks the diminutive by fronting non-high vowels of nominal roots and the augmentative by backing non-high vowels of nominal roots. The root-vowel mutation is considered to be an effect of diminutive and augmentative morphemes which have [―back] and [+back] features as their phonetic exponents. The form–meaning association of the morphemes is consistent with the pattern of sound-size symbolism in various languages. Thus Fungwa presents categorical and deterministic evidence for sound-size symbolism. To account for the realisation of the featural affixes, I assume featural correspondence constraints. Given that the featural affixes are not realised on high vowels, I argue that the realisation of the featural affixes involves a prominence-based licensing condition.

This paper presents the results of a corpus study and an online loanword adaptation experiment examining the tonal adaptation of English loanwords in Mandarin. Using maximum entropy models, I control for the substantial influences of lexical tone distributions and standardisation, and uncover phonological determinants of tone beyond these lexical and conventional factors. The most important phonological determinant of tone in the corpus was English voicing, while in the experiment it was English stress-aligned pitch contours. I argue that these distinct tonal adaptation patterns constitute two different perceptual mappings, one from F0 perturbations to tone and the other from English intonation to tone, both arising due to particular borrowing contexts. I suggest that increasingly close contact between English and Mandarin may lead to more intonation-driven tonal adaptation in the latest wave of borrowing. The maximum entropy approach holds promise for the analysis of complex cases of tonal adaptation in other languages.

In this paper, I develop an analysis of the Italian syntax–prosody interface in Match Theory, revisiting three φ-diagnostics from previous work: word-final vowel deletion, stress retraction and final lengthening. I show that these processes sometimes diverge in their distribution, supporting the existence of two phrasal domains in Italian. These domains are analysed using prosodic recursion. I then develop a novel formulation of MatchXP, according to which only syntactic XPs with phonologically overt heads, whether lexical or functional, are visible to the syntax–prosody mapping. This formulation is argued to be superior to versions of MatchXP that only match lexical XPs or that attempt to match all XPs, at least in Italian, suggesting that implementation of syntax–prosody mapping constraints may be subject to cross-linguistic variation.

Previous research has found that different syllabic (particularly simplex vs. complex onset) organisations have different temporal stability signatures in articulations – this observation is based entirely on articulatory measurements. In this article, we present the results of three production experiments which show that similar correlations between onset organisation and temporal stability metrics are observable in an analysis of acoustic measurements in American English and Jazani Arabic. The results that we present show stability across speakers and test items for both language groups, and highlight the possibility of using acoustic techniques to help to investigate the organisation of onsets in other languages.

This study explores ongoing lenition of postvocalic /p t k b d g/ in the Spanish of Gran Canaria. Duration, intensity and harmonics-to-noise ratio of 16,454 sounds produced by 44 native speakers were measured, with the latter phonetic parameter used for the first time to investigate lenition. The results show a path of gradual sound shortening and opening from voiceless stops to open approximants, as well as systematic use of six different variants depending on the underlying representation and phonological context: two types of [p t k], two types of [b d g] and two types of [β˕ ð˕ ɣ˕]. We interpret this as continuity lenition that leads to the flattening of the intensity contour and harmonicity of the target segment with respect to the flanking sounds. We argue that a phonological analysis of this process that accounts for its non-neutralising character requires the use of a scalar [aperture] feature.

This paper reports a new kind of tone polarity, where the phenomenon is seen in a language with four level tones, Tenyidie (also known as Angami). I show that the polarity is in the features of the tones, i.e. at a subtonal level. The data also provide evidence that tones themselves can be broken down into smaller features. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the polarity pattern observed in the language is an epiphenomenon, a reflex of the Obligatory Contour Principle, not a phonological process in its own right. I show this with the help of a new type of tonal representation. Theoretical discussions of tone polarity have so far been almost entirely restricted to African tone systems, and to languages with just two tones. This paper brings into the discussion a Tibeto-Burman language with four tones.

During acquisition children internalise adult-based phonological patterns and alternately adopt and discard child-specific patterns reflecting their unskilled production. The child-specific patterns are often assumed to be low-level phonetic effects, and so, in a classical modular feedforward grammar, they should not interfere with the higher-level adult-based phonology. This paper reports an interaction in which the application of a categorical adult-based process (Voice Assimilation) is conditioned by a gradient child-specific process (fricative devoicing). Acoustic analyses of longitudinal data from a Polish-speaking child reveal variable Voice Assimilation effects in target voiced fricative–stop/stop–fricative clusters (voicing and devoicing), correlated with the extent of voicing in fricatives in non-assimilatory contexts. I analyse this phonology–phonetics trade-off by appealing to symbol-like dynamical representations, expressed in the language of non-linear mathematics. Such representations offer a non-derivational link between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of speech. Variability ensues as a natural consequence of grammar change.

Phonological coalescence, understood as a type of synchronic alternation in which two phonological elements seem to fuse into one, presents a prima facie challenge for versions of Optimality Theory that assume the principle of containment. If all underlying material has to be present in the output form, replacing two input elements with a single output element is not straightforward. I argue that, under the assumptions of Autosegmental Coloured Containment Theory, a distinct operation of coalescence is unnecessary, as all major types of coalescence patterns can be analysed in terms of (i) adding new association lines between some autosegmental nodes, and (ii) the underparsing of other nodes, leading to their phonetic non-realisation. The proposed analysis accurately reflects the heterogeneity of coalescence alternations, which are shown to fall into three different types.