Overview

Drawing on a typological survey of 400 languages, this is the first systematic exploration of a series of phonological phenomena previously thought to be unified under the rubric of syllable weight. The book reveals that the traditional conception that languages are internally consistent in their weight criteria across weight-based processes is not corroborated by the cross-linguistic survey. Exploring the motivations behind the process-specific nature of weight, this book shows that phonetic factors explain much of the variation in weight criteria between phenomena and also the variation in criteria between languages for a single process. Unlike most other studies on the subject, this book combines an extensive typological survey with detailed phonetic analysis of many languages. The discovery that the widely studied phenomenon of syllable weight is not a unified phenomenon is a significant result in the field of theoretical phonology. The book is also an important contribution to the field, since it established a close link between the phonology of weight and various quantitative phonetic parameters.

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9786611135928

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