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There are books on tone, coronals, the internal structure of
segments, vowel harmony, and a couple of other topics in phonology.
This book aims to fill the gap for Lenition and Fortition, which is
one of the first phenomena that was addressed by phonologists in
the 19th century, and ever since contributed to phonological
thinking. It is certainly one of the core phenomena that is found
in the phonology of natural language: together with assimilations,
the other important family of phenomena, Lenition and Fortition
constitute the heart of what phonology can do to sound. The book
aims to provide an overall treatment of the question in its many
aspects: historical, typological, synchronic, diachronic, empirical
and theoretical. Various current approaches to phonology are
represented. The book is structured into three parts: 1) properties
and behaviour of Lenition/Fortition, 2) lenition patterns in
particular languages and language families, 3) how
Lenition/Fortition work. Part 1 describes the properties of
lenition and fortition: what counts as such? What kind of behaviour
is observed? Which factors bear on it (positional, stress-related)?
Which role has it played in phonology since (and even before) the
19th century? The
everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-lenition-and-fortition
philosophy that guides the conception of the book supposes a
descriptive, generalisation-oriented style of writing that relies
on a kind of phonological lingua franca, rather than on
theory-laden vocabulary. Also, no prior knowledge other than about
general phonological categories should be required when reading
through Part 1. The goal is to provide a broad picture of what
lenition is, how it behaves, which factors it is conditioned by and
what generalisations it obeys. This record may then be used as a
yardstick for competing theories. Part 2 presents a number of case
studies that show how Lenition/Fortition behave in a number of
languages that include systems which are notoriously emblematic for
Lenition/Fortition: Celtic, Western Romance, Germanic and Finnish.
Finally, Part 3 is concerned with the analysis of the patterns that
have been described in Parts 1 and 2. Given their analytic
orientation, Part 3 chapters are theory-specific. They look at the
same empirical record, or at a subset thereof, and try to explain
what they see. Even though Part 3 chapters are couched in a
specific theoretical environment that most of the time supposes
prior conceptual knowledge, authors have been asked to assure
theoretical interoperability as much as they could.
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