Blends, also called portmanteau words, are formed by fusing two words into one new word, where internal portions of the base words are often subtracted (one segmental string from the right part of the first word and another from the left part of the second word). For example, the English blend nixonomics has been formed by combining nixon and economics and subtracting the string neco. (For clarity of exposition, blends will be usually represented as nixo <n⋅eco> nomics, where the subtracted material is enclosed in angled brackets and the boundary between the base elements is indicated by ⋅).

Theories of stress assignment commonly assume that syllable onsets do not determine a syllable's ability to attract stress. In the frameworks of McCarthy (1979) and Hayes (1981, 1995), for example, only the rhyme is projected in order to determine the weight of a syllable. In Moraic Theory (Hyman 1985), onsets do not contribute to the weight of a syllable as a consequence of the Onset Creation rule, by which onsets lose their weightbearing unit. In the framework of Hayes (1989), the rule of Weight-by-Position ensures that only coda consonants can ever be weight-bearing.

One of the fundamental claims of modern phonology is that generalisations about phonemes are based on a small, universal set of phonetically defined features. The theory of distinctive features is a very powerful idea, insofar as it predicts that sets of phonemes will act together in specific ways within and across languages, allowing the voiceless stops [p t k] to serve as a unified target or trigger class, but ruling out the possibility that [p r y a] will function as a unitary class. Much of the appeal of distinctive features lies in the fact that the rich array of segments and processes encountered in the world's languages can be understood in terms of a very small number of features. Numerous hypotheses have been advanced regarding what that set of features is – see Jakobson et al. (1952), Chomsky & Halle (1968), Sagey (1990) and Clements & Hume (1995), inter al. The ideal set of features must be rich enough to express phonemic contrasts which actually exist, and must otherwise be capable of capturing generalisations about sound structure. Equally important, a theory of features should be maximally impoverished – it should use the minimum resources necessary to describe languages.

In the theory of articulatory phonology Browman & Goldstein (1986, 1990, 1992) claim that place assimilation is mainly the result of the overlap of gestures and the perception of these overlapping gestures as a single gesture. Ohala (1990) makes a similar claim. The present study provides interesting experimental evidence against this explanation of assimilation as a result of gestural overlap and resulting misperception, and for the importance of gestural reduction.

An issue which engaged the attention of phonologists following the publication of Halle & Vergnaud's ground-breaking Essay on stress (1987a) was the proper treatment of stress systems in which iterative foot structure is apparently required to locate the main prominence, yet expected secondary stresses are absent in the output. The solution proposed by Halle & Vergnaud was that unwanted secondary stresses are removed by a special repair mechanism, Conflation, accompanied by the automatic erasure of headless feet. The pattern which initially motivated the rule was found to exist in a very few languages: Cairene Arabic (Mitchell 1956, 1960, 1962; Langendoen 1968; McCarthy 1979; Stevens & Salib 1987), Seminole/Creek (Haas 1977; Jackson 1987; Tyhurst 1987) and possibly Palestinian Arabic (Brame 1973; Kenstowicz & Abdul-Karim 1980; Hayes 1995; inter al.).