Tobias Scheer

Unified representations for stress and the syllable

We argue that there is no need to split phonological representations into two worlds : one syllabic and another in which word stress is calculated. We show that both syllable- and stress-related phenomena can be accounted for with a single set of representations, if traditional syllabic analysis is modified in one central respect : what is traditionally taken to be a coda–onset cluster is interpreted as two independent onsets enclosing an empty nucleus. Accordingly, our proposal may be understood as a development of the idea that underlies classical metrical grids, i.e. that stress-relevant units project to higher levels and are therefore visible for stress. The units in the proposal made here, however, are uniformly nuclei. Contentful nuclei are always projected, while their empty counterparts (i.e. codas in traditional approaches) may or may not be. The weightlessness of onsets directly follows from this approach.

What OT is, and what it is not

As indicated by the title, the book under review embraces the ambition of representing a field of research, phonology. Handbooks are supposed to stand on the desk of interested people, ready to provide easy and speedy access to the state of the art whenever a question comes up. I think that the book lives up to the promise that is made by handbooks – but regarding Optimality Theory (in phonology), rather than phonology as such. On page 8, Paul de Lacy very carefully argues why the book only contains OT, and he may well have a point: roughly speaking, the book is but a mirror of the field, which is dominated by OT. In a note (29), de Lacy reports that ‘from inspecting several major journals from 1998 to 2004, around threequarters of the articles assumed an OT framework, and many of the others compared their theories with an OT approach’.2 If the book is thus about phonology, and if phonology today is 75% OT, then 25% of the field is missing. Also, if other theories compare their approaches to OT, the reverse unfortunately is not true. This is the typical relationship between a mainstream and its periphery, or between dominant languages and small neighbours : the latter gets involved with the former, but the dominant mainstream ignores the rest. The Portuguese understand the Spanish, but not the other way round. The structure of a typical chapter is like this : ‘here is the topic at hand, here is the issue that it raises, here is how phonologists have looked at it in

Invariant syllable skeleton, complex segments and word edges

San Duanmus Syllable Structure: The Limits of Variation raises a number of questions that are of general interest for phonological theory. Of special interest here are: the genesis and management of linearity in complex segments, the place of analogy (or paradigm uniformity) in grammar, the role of morphology in accounting for phonological patterns, the balance of static (distributional patterns) and dynamic (phonological processes) evidence for syllable structure, the role of stress in syllabification, and the import of corpus-based data for phonological analysis. In each case, Duanmus proposals are evaluated according to their intrinsic consistency, the empirical record and the relevant body of literature. Alternative ways of handling the phenomena are offered, and these are fairly traditional in most cases. Duanmus book is particularly relevant in the current constitution of the field where the see-saw movement between computation and representations seems to swing back in direction of the latter after having long been immobilised on the computational end. Standing clearly on the representational side, the theory exposed in the book aims to show that all surface strings may be reduced to a fixed and invariant syllable template, C(onsonant)V(owel)X. This enterprise is interesting especially in presence of another representationally-oriented theory, CVCV (Lowenstamm 1996 , Scheer 2004 ), which also aims at reducing surface variation to an invariant syllabic skeleton, made of a monotonic sequence of CV units. However, the CVX and the CVCV templates are quite distinct, and the strategies that are used in order to accommodate the surface string are opposite (shrinking in the former case, expanding in the latter).