Martin Krämer - Böcker

This volume brings together a range of approaches to linearization in phonology and its interfaces with phonetics and syntax. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches, the chapters explore the viability of accounts of linear order at different levels of representation, from the subsegmental and segmental domain to larger syntactic units. A series of central issues revolving around sequencing and phonological movement form a common theme across the book: these include the nature of rules deriving precedence relations; the indispensability of formal devices determining linearization; the role of phonology in the surface order of morphemes in a word and of words in a sentence; the size and shape of constituents subject to dislocation; and the extent to which (re)arrangement can result in structural optimization. Each chapter engages with a subset of these topics, either addressing broad theoretical questions and challenges to well-established notions, or exploring specific phenomena and patterns. Throughout the volume, the authors demonstrate that sequencing phenomena can be explained without recourse to underlying linear order. The variety of formal frameworks employed in the chapters reflects the rich toolset through which linearization in phonology can be formalized.

Vowel Harmony and Correspondence Theory covers the major issues in the generative analysis of vowel harmony and vowel harmony typology. The book offers an economical account of the most prominent features of vowel harmony systems (root control, affix control, dominance, vowel opacity, and neutrality) within the framework of optimality theory, extending the notion of correspondence to the syntagmatic dimension.The book contains a typological overview of vowel harmony patterns, an introduction to the basics of optimality theory including some of its most recent extensions and detailed studies of harmony systems in 10 languages from a variety of language families.

This volume draws together papers that argue for a renewed focus on the role of hard constraints on phonological representations as well as the processes that operate on them. These are issues that have been sidelined since the shift in emphasis in phonological research to functionally grounded output-oriented constraints. Taking Optimality Theory as their starting point, the articles attack the question to what degree the Generator function Gen should be given freedom of analysis on three fronts.(1) What is the nature of the representations that Gen manipulates? Is a return to more articulated theories of segmental and prosodic representation desirable?(2) What restrictions might there be on the operations that Gen carries out on representations? Should Gen be endowed with structure-changing potential, as assumed in work couched within Correspondence Theory, or is a return to the principle of Containment preferable? Should Gen be restricted in the number of edits it can carry out at any one time? Should Gen be restricted to generating phonetically interpretable candidates? (3) What is the relationship between Gen and functionally arbitrary or opaque phonological patterns? Should Gen's freedom be restricted in order to account for language-specific phonology?The solutions offered to these questions bear significantly on current issues that are of fundamental concern in linguistic theory, including representations, parallelism vs. serialism, and the division of labour between linguistic modules. The authors scrutinize these issues using data from a variety of unrelated languages, including Czech, English, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hawaiian, Lardil, Spanish, Turkish, and Yowlumne.