This book takes contrast, an issue that has been central to phonological theory since Saussure, as its central theme, making explicit its importance to phonological theory, perception, and acquisition. The volume brings together a number of different contemporary approaches to the theory of contrast, including chapters set within more abstract representation-based theories, as well as chapters that focus on functional phonetic theories and perceptual constraints. This book will be of interest to phonologists, phoneticians, psycholinguists, researchers in first and second language acquisition, and cognitive scientists interested in current thinking on this exciting topic.

This book will create greater public awareness of some recent exciting findings in the formal study of poetry. The last influential volume on the subject, Rhythm and Meter , edited by Paul Kiparsky and Gilbert Youmans, appeared fifteen years ago. Since that time, a number of important theoretical developments have taken place, which have led to new approaches to the analysis of meter. This volume represents some of the most exciting current thinking on the theory of meter. In terms of empirical coverage, the papers focus on a wide variety of languages, including English, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, Japanese, Somali, Old Norse, Latin, and Greek. Thus, the collection is truly international in its scope. The volume also contains diverse theoretical approaches that are brought together for the first time, including Optimality Theory (Kiparsky, Hammond), other constraint-based approaches (Friedberg, Hall, Scherr), the Quantitative approach to verse (Tarlinskaja, Friedberg, Hall, Scherr, Youmans) associated with the Russian school of metrics, a mora-based approach (Cole and Miyashita, Fitzgerald), a semantic-pragmatic approach (Fabb), and an alternative generative approach developed in Estonia (M. Lotman and M. K. Lotman). The book will be of interest to both linguists interested in stress and speech rhythm, constraint systems, phrasing, and phonology-syntax interaction and poetry, as well as to students of poetry interested in the connection between language and literature.

'Contrast' - the opposition between distinctive sounds in a language - is one of the most central concepts in linguistics. This book presents a fascinating account of the logic and history of contrast in phonology. It provides empirical evidence from diverse phonological domains that only contrastive features are computed by the phonological component of grammar. It argues that the contrastive specifications of phonemes are governed by language-particular feature hierarchies. This approach assigns a key role to abstract cognitive structures, challenging contemporary approaches that favour phonetic explanations of phonological phenomena. Tracing the evolution of the hypothesis that contrastive features play a special role in phonology, it shows how this insight has been obscured by misunderstandings of the role of the contrastive feature hierarchy. Questioning the widely held notion that contrast should be based on minimal pairs, Elan Dresher argues that the contrastive hierarchy is indispensable to illuminating accounts of phonological patterning.

'Contrast' - the opposition between distinctive sounds in a language - is one of the most central concepts in linguistics. This book presents a fascinating account of the logic and history of contrast in phonology. It provides empirical evidence from diverse phonological domains that only contrastive features are computed by the phonological component of grammar. It argues that the contrastive specifications of phonemes are governed by language-particular feature hierarchies. This approach assigns a key role to abstract cognitive structures, challenging contemporary approaches that favour phonetic explanations of phonological phenomena. Tracing the evolution of the hypothesis that contrastive features play a special role in phonology, it shows how this insight has been obscured by misunderstandings of the role of the contrastive feature hierarchy. Questioning the widely held notion that contrast should be based on minimal pairs, Elan Dresher argues that the contrastive hierarchy is indispensable to illuminating accounts of phonological patterning.