This book is the first volume specifically devoted to the phonetics and phonology of geminate consonants, a feature of many of the world's languages including Arabic, Bengali, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malayalam, Persian, Saami, Swiss German, and Turkish. While the contrast between geminate and singleton consonants has been widely studied, the phonetic manifestation and phonological nature of geminate consonants, as well as their cross-linguistic similarities and differences, are not fully understood. The volume brings together original data and novel analyses of geminate consonants in a variety of languages across the world. Experts in the field present a wide range of approaches to the study of phonological contrasts in general by introducing various experimental and non-experimental methodologies; they also discuss phonological contrasts in a wider context and examine the behaviour of geminate consonants in loanword phonology and language acquisition. The volume takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on experimental phonetics, theoretical phonology, speech processing, neurolinguistics, and language acquisition.

SCHRIFTEN DES INSTITUTS FUER DEUTSCHE SPRACHE (SIDS) is published by the German Language Institute (IDS) in Mannheim. The German Language Institute is one of the most prominent research institutes for research and documentation of the German language in the past and present. The renowned publications series SIDS publishes the results of research projects at the German Language Institute. The series includes high-quality handbooks, e.g. Grammar of the German Language (Strecker/Hoffmann/Zifonun), and fundamental monographs on all areas of the grammar, pragmatics, lexicon and morphology of German. SIDS is a standard series of German linguistics.

How do you pronounce biopic, synod, and Breughel? - and why? Do our cake and archaic sound the same? Where does the stress go in stalagmite? What's odd about the word epergne? Pontcysyllte is obviously Welsh, but Penge is Welsh too! How cool is Caol in the Highlands of Scotland? What can Wesley's hymns tell us about sound change in English? How do people pronounce Wroclaw in Poland? How can anyone manage to say Gdynia as just two syllables? Why is the village of Frith in the island of Montserrat usually pronounced as if spelt Frits? What embarrassing faux pas in English did a Russian conglomerate make? Should I bild a cubbard instead of building a cupboard? How should we capitalize an exclamation mark, and why might we need to? What's a depressor consonant? As a finale, the author writes a letter to his 16-year-old self.

This book centers on theoretical issues of phonology-syntax interface based on tone sandhi in Chinese dialects. It uses patterns in tone sandhi to study how speech should be divided into domains of various sizes or levels. Tone sandhi refers to tonal changes that occur to a sequence of adjacent syllables or words. The size of this sequence (or the domain) is determined by various factors, in particular the syntactic structure of the words and the original tones of the words. Chinese dialects offer a rich body of data on tone sandhi, and hence great evidence for examining the phonology-syntax interface, and for examining the resulting levels of domains (the prosodic hierarchy). Syntax-Phonology Interface: Argumentation from Tone Sandhi in Chinese Dialects is an extremely valuable text for graduate students and scholars in the fields of linguistics and Chinese.

This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Speakers can modulate the meaning and effects of their utterances by changing the location of stress or of pauses, and by choosing the melody of their sentences. Although these factors often do not change the literal meaning of what is said, linguists have in recent years found tools and models to describe these more elusive aspects of linguistic meaning. This volume provides a guide to what we know about the interplay between prosody-stress, phrasing, and melody-and interpretation-felicity in discourse, inferences, and emphasis. Daniel Buring presents the main phenomena involved, and introduces the details of current formal analyses of prosodic structure, relevant aspects of discourse structure, intonational meaning, and, most importantly, the relations between them. He explains and compares the most influential theories in these areas, and outlines the questions that remain open for future research. This wide-ranging book involves aspects of phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and will be of interest to researchers and students in all of these fields, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

This volume contains detailed surveys of the intonational phonology of fourteen typologically diverse languages, described in the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Unlike the first volume, half of the languages are understudied languages and/or researched through fieldwork, and all vary widely in their word prosody as well as their geographic distribution. Each chapter provides the prosodic structure and intonational categories of the language as well as a description of focus prosody. The book also includes a chapter on the methodology of studying intonation from data collection to analysis, as well as a chapter on prosidic typology which proposes a new way of characterizing the intonation of the world's languages. The sound files accompaning the descriptions are available on the book's companion website.

Phonologically prominent or "strong" positions are well known for their ability to resist positional neutralization processes such as vowel reduction or place assimilation. However, there are also cases of neutralization that affect only strong positions, as when stressed syllables must be heavy, default stress is inserted into roots, or word-initial onsets must be low in sonority. In this book, Jennifer Smith shows that phonological processes specific to strong positions are distinct from those involved in classic positional neutralization effects because they always serve to augment the strong position with a perceptually salient characteristic. Formally, positional augmentation effects are modeled by means of markedness constraints relativized to strong positions. Because positional augmentation constraints are subject to certain substantive restrictions, as seen in their connection to perceptual salience, this study has implications for the relationship between functional grounding and phonological theory.

This is a text-based study of fixed expressions, or idioms. Rosamund Moon's central argument is that fixed expressions can only be fully understood if they are considered in the context of the texts in which they occur. She examines several thousand fixed expressions and how they are being used in current English. She argues that examination of the corpus raises questions about many received ideas on fixed expressions and idioms, and suggests that new, use-centred, models are required.

This book presents a phenomenon-oriented survey of the interaction between phonology and morphology. It examines the ways in which morphology, i.e. word formation, demonstrates sensitivity to phonological information and how phonological patterns can be sensitive to morphology. Chapters focus on morphologically conditioned phonology, process morphology, prosodic templates, reduplication, infixation, phonology-morphology interleaving effects, prosodic-morphological mismatches, ineffability, and other cases of phonology-morphology interaction. The overview discusses the relevance of a variety of phenomena for theoretical issues in the field. These include the debate over item-based vs. realizational approaches to morphology; the question of whether cyclic effects can be subsumed under paradigmatic effects; whether reduplication is phonological copying or morphological doubling; whether infixation and suppletive allomorphy are phonologically optimizing, and more. The book is intended to be used in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses or as a reference for those pursuing individual topics in the phonology-morphology interface.

This book presents a phenomenon-oriented survey of the interaction between phonology and morphology. It examines the ways in which morphology, i.e. word formation, demonstrates sensitivity to phonological information and how phonological patterns can be sensitive to morphology. Chapters focus on morphologically conditioned phonology, process morphology, prosodic templates, reduplication, infixation, phonology-morphology interleaving effects, prosodic-morphological mismatches, ineffability, and other cases of phonology-morphology interaction. The overview discusses the relevance of a variety of phenomena for theoretical issues in the field. These include the debate over item-based vs. realizational approaches to morphology; the question of whether cyclic effects can be subsumed under paradigmatic effects; whether reduplication is phonological copying or morphological doubling; whether infixation and suppletive allomorphy are phonologically optimizing, and more. The book is intended to be used in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses or as a reference for those pursuing individual topics in the phonology-morphology interface.

Making New Words provides a detailed study of the 200 or so prefixes and suffixes which create new words in today's English. Alongside a systematic discussion of these forms, Professor Dixon explores and explains the hundreds of conundrums that seem to be exceptions to general rules. Why, for instance, do we say un-distinguished (with prefix un-) but in-distinguishable (with in-); why un-ceasing but in-cesssant? Why, alongside gold-en, do we say silver-y (not silver-en)? Why is it wood-en (not wood-ic) but metall-ic (not metall-en)? After short preliminary chapters, which set the scene and outline the criteria employed, there are accounts of the derivation of negative words, of other derivations which do not change word class, on making new verbs, new adjectives, new nouns, and new adverbs. The final chapter deals with combinations of suffixes, of prefixes, and of the two together. Within each chapter, derivational affixes are arranged in semantic groups, the members of which are contrasted with respect to meaning and function; for example, child-less and child-free. For each affix there is an account of its genetic origin (from Old English, Greek, Latin, French, and so on), its phonological form and implications for stress placement, the roots it can be attached to (and why), and how its range of meanings has developed over the centuries. The book is written in the author's accustomed style - clear and well-organised, with easy-to-understand explanations. The exposition is illustrated by examples, ranging from Shakespeare, W. S. Gilbert, and modern novels to what was heard on the radio. It will be an invaluable text and sourcebook for scholars and students of the English language and of general linguistics, from undergraduate level upwards. The many fascinating facts presented here, in such a lucid and accessible manner, will also appeal to the general reader interested in picking to pieces the English language to see how it works.

Research on sound change often focuses on vowels, yet consonantal sound change also offers fascinating insights into language development and variation. This pioneering book provides a detailed investigation of consonantal sound change in English, by analyzing a large corpus of specifically designed field recordings from Austin, Texas. It offers one of the most in-depth analyses of /str/-retraction to date, drawing comparisons with studies of change in the distinguishing phonetic features of other varieties of English, and with studies of /str/-retraction in other Germanic languages. It further deepens our understanding of sound change by including qualitative data to position the sound change in the social reality of Austin, showing that specific sound changes are universally driven by age, gender and ethnicity. The results provide a testing ground for models of sociolinguistic and sound change, and highlight the importance of the social fabric of language in modeling language change.

Are the rules and principles in phonology so general that, as Jacques Derrida once said, "as soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene"? (REL 2013) This general view on language (or phonology in the current context) can be contrasted with an opposing view by Alfred North Whitehead that "we think in generalities, but we live in detail." (BRAIN 2013) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), phonology (in relation to generality and specificity) are neither possible (nor impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe. Surely, this re-examination of different opposing views on phonology does not mean that the study of generality and specificity is futile, or that those fields (related to phonology) -- like descriptive linguistics, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, phonetics, speech synthesis, speech perception, morphophonology, articulatory phonology, laboratory phonology, phonotactics, and so on -- are unimportant. (WK 2013) In fact, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Rather, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of phonology in regard to the dialectic relationship between generality and specificity -- while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favouring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the inclusionist theory of phonology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organised in four chapters.

This book presents a comprehensive, contrastive account of the phonological structures and characteristics of Swedish. After an introduction on the history of the language and its relation to other Scandinavian languages, the book is divided into parts dealing with segmental phonology, lower prosodic phonology, stress and tone, morphology-phonology interactions, higher prosodic phonology, and intonation. The book concludes with concise accounts of phonotactics and the relationship between phonology and orthography. Tomas Riad's approach is data-oriented and, insofar as possible, theory-neutral. As well as making an important contribution to its subject, his book provides new insights into how morphology largely determines the distribution of stress in a Germanic language, and how tonal accent may signal wellformedness in word formation.

This book is a comprehensive yet succinct overview of research on prosodic development, uniting phonetic, phonological, and clinical approaches to the topic. It brings together diverse research findings on prosodic perception, prosodic production, the development of prosodic structure, and prosodic disorders in clinical populations. The book is written for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, as well as for professionals and scholars working in linguistics, child language development, psychology, or related disciplines. It also introduces the reader to important related themes in speech perception research such as prosodic bootstrapping and word segmentation. Included in this first part is a discussion of the production of prosody during the pre-linguistic and early linguistic periods, with a focus on central topics such as ambient language effects and differentiation of prosody according to pragmatic function. In this part is where the discussion of the development of individual prosodic systems such as stress, timing, intonation, and tone are discussed. This book also deals with clinical aspects of prosody such as the assessment of prosody and atypical prosody in clinical conditions such as autistic spectrum disorder, childhood apraxia of speech, specific language impairment, and hearing impairment. The book's cross-linguistic approach is documented through numerous examples and illustrations. Chapter summaries, relevant sidebar topics, and a list of key terms make the book highly readable and accessible.