The papers collected in this volume apply principles of phonology and morphology to the Germanic languages. Phonological phenomena range from subsegmental over phonemic to prosodic units (as syllables, pitch accent, stress). Morphology includes properties of roots, derivation, inflection, and words. The analyses deal with language-internal and comparative aspects, covering the whole (European) range of Germanic languages. From a theoretical perspective, most papers concentrate on constraint-based approaches. Crucial to those theories are principles of the phonology-morphology interaction, both within and between languages. The well documented Germanic languages provide an excellent field for research and almost all papers deal with aspects of the interface.

The monograph contains two case studies dealing with the phonetics and phonology of affricates and laryngeals from a survey of 281 languages. The empirical findings go counter to a number of assumptions in the literature, e.g.: (1) affricates are exclusively stops from the perspective of phonology; (2) laryngeals are properties of the prosodic domains onset, nucleus, and coda; (3) phonetic strategies (affrication, laryngeal phasing) serve to make phonological specifications acoustically more salient. Theoretical discussions include questions of phonological representation (featural contours, prosodic licensing etc.) and the phonology-phonetics interface.

This volume seeks to reevaluate the nature of tone-segment interactions in phonology. The contributions address, among other things, the following basic questions: what tone-segment interactions exist, and how can the facts be incorporated into phonological theory? Are interactions between tones and vowel quality really universally absent? What types of tone-consonant interactions do we find across languages? What is the relation between diachrony and synchrony in relevant processes? The contributions discuss data from various types of languages where tonal information plays a lexically distinctive role, from 'pure' tone languages to so-called tone accent systems, where the occurrence of contrastive tonal melodies is restricted to stressed syllables. The volume has an empirical emphasis on Franconian dialects in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, but also discusses languages as diverse as Slovenian, Livonian, Fuzhou Chinese, and Xhosa.