Core Areas

This page describes those core areas of phonology for which the Forum has so far gathered material. By "core areas" we mean those parts of phonological theory that are primarily responsible for capturing linguistically significant generalizations concerning the phenomena that most phonologists consider central. These include generalizations about phoneme inventories, morpheme alternations, stress, and the distribution of phonemic and phonetic elements.

A lot of the material on this web site is from a book to be published by MIT Press, tentatively entitled "Contemporary Views on Architecture and Representations in Phonological Theory", edited by Eric Raimy and me (Chuck Cairns). The sources of other material are indicated below.

Feature Theory

The Feature Theory page contains material by Nick Clements, Elan Dresher, Morris Halle, and Andrea Calabrese.

• Clements "The Role of Features in Phonological Inventories" PDF | Word
  • Illustrations for the above PDF | Word
  • Tables for the above PDF | Word
• Calabrese's comments: "Variations on a Theme by Clements" PDF | Word
• Illustrations for the above PDF | Word
• Bibliography for the above PDF | Word
• Halle's comments: (as yet untitled) PDF | Word
  • Illustrations for the above PDF | Word
• Vaux's comments: (untitled) PDF | Word
  • Bibliography for above (there are no illustrations) PDF | Word

The CUNY Phonology Forum held a workshop on feature theory in the Spring of 2004. Nick Clements and Elan Dresher were the two presenters. The papers for that are not quite in finished form, but there's plenty of value in what we do have. I have also posted some background papers.

Clements' "Design Features of Vowel Systems: The Role of Feature Economy" is only in powerpoint format; I hope to render this in more accessible formats in the near future. Click here.

The handout for Dresher's paper is here (in pdf format only).

Go to the papers page of the CUNY Phonology Forum website for two more very interesting papers that give insight into Dresher's approach to feature theory: Mackenzie and Dresher, and Dresher and Xhang. Dresher's website also has links to some valuable downloadable papers: . His page on "Markedness and the Contrastive Hierarchy in Phonology" is of partiocular interest.

Syllable Theory

Bert Vaux's contribution to the Symposium is listed here. Commentary by Chuck Cairns, Eric Raimy, and Nick Clements are also available.

• Vaux and Wolf "The Appendix" PDF | Word
  • Illustrations for the above PDF | Word
• Cairns: "Phonological Representations and the Vaux - Wolf Proposal" PDF | Word
• Illustrations for the above PDF | Word
• TABLE for the above PDF | Word
• Clements: "Does Sonority have a Phonetic Basis?" PDF
• Raimy: "A case of Appendicitis" PDF | Word
• Illustrations for the above PDF | Word

Theories of Phonological Stress

Bill Idsardi has an article on this page describing a revised model of stress assignment and showing how the model can be reduced to finite state automata. Commentaries by Elan Dresher and Harry van der Hulst are also here. Keren Rice's comments will be posted here soon.

Overall Architecture of Phonological Theory

The unrevised version of Andrea Calabrese's paper "Prolegomena to a Realistic Theory of Phonology" given at the Symposium is posted here.

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