This book is designed to provide students of phonology with an accessible introduction to the phonological architecture of words. It offers a thorough discussion of the basic building blocks of phonology--in particular features, sounds, syllables and feet--and deals with a range of different theories about these units. The book provides a more detailed analysis of this subject than previously available in introductory textbooks and is an invaluable and indispensable first step toward understanding the major theoretical issues in modern phonology at the word level.

John Anderson and Colin Ewen, two of the most notable exponents of 'dependency phonology', present in this book a detailed account of this integrated model for the representational of segmental and suprasegmental structure in phonology. Dependency phonology departs from traditional 'linear' models of phonology, and the more recent non-linear models of autosegmental and metrical phonology, in several respects. Unlike in these models, suprasegmental structure is derived directly from the segmental representations, and these representations are based on single-valued features, or components (rather than Chomsky and Halle-type binary features), linked by the dependency relation to form suprasegmental structures, with the exact nature of the dependency relations being directly determined by the properties of the segmental structure. Phonology is currently noteworthy for the diversity of views within the discipline, but no linguist or phonetician with a serious interest in phonology can afford to ignore this book or fail to be interested by it.

This book is designed to provide students of phonology with an accessible introduction to the phonological architecture of words. It offers a thorough discussion of the basic building blocks of phonology--in particular features, sounds, syllables and feet--and deals with a range of different theories about these units. The book provides a more detailed analysis of this subject than previously available in introductory textbooks and is an invaluable and indispensable first step toward understanding the major theoretical issues in modern phonology at the word level.