Elements, Government, and Licensing

Elements, Government and Licensing brings together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology.

Elements, Government, and Licensing brings together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology. It covers three principal domains of phonological representation: melody and segmental structure; tone, prosody and prosodic structure; and phonological relations, empty categories, and vowel-zero alternations. Theoretical topics covered include the formalisation of Element Theory, the hotly debated topic of structural recursion in phonology, and the empirical status of government.
In addition, a wealth of new analyses and empirical evidence sheds new light on empty categories in phonology, the analysis of certain consonantal sequences, phonological and non-phonological alternation, the elemental composition of segments, and many more. Taking up long-standing empirical and theoretical issues informed by the Government Phonology and Element Theory, this book provides theoretical advances while also bringing to light new empirical evidence and analysis challenging previous generalisations.
The insights offered here will be equally exciting for phonologists working on related issues inside and outside the Principles & Parameters programme, such as researchers working in Optimality Theory or classical rule-based phonology.

List of figures
List of tables
List of symbols and abbreviations
Notes on contributors

1 Principles and parameters in phonology: an introduction and overview
Connor Youngberg, Yuko Yoshida and Florian Breit

Part 1: Melody and segmental representation

2 Melody and segmental representation: a brief introduction
Florian Breit

3 On hedgehogs and gold in Bavarian: l-vocalisation in Upper Austrian German
Sabrina Bendjaballah

4 Sets of (sets of) elements
Florian Breit

5 Production-bias and substance-free representation of laryngeal distinctions
Eugeniusz Cyran

6 The no-crossing constraint – a neglected licensing constraint
John R. Rennison

Part 2: Prosody and constituent structure

7 Prosody and constituent structure: a brief introduction
Yuko Yoshida

8 Prevocalic tenseness in English, binarity and the typology of long vowel distributions
Katalin Balogné Bérces and Shanti Ulfsbjorninn

9 Vowel length and prominence in Cairene Arabic
Radwa Fathi

10 #sC in stereo: a dichotic-listening study of Cypriot Greek initial consonant clusters
John Harris and Faith Chiu

11 The segholate verbs of English
Jean Lowenstamm

12 From me to [juː]: on government licensing and light diphthongs
Markus Pöchtrager

13 Licensor tier and culminativity
Yuko Yoshida

Part 3: Emptiness, schwa, and epenthesis

14 Emptiness, schwa, and epenthesis: a brief introduction
Connor Youngberg

15 Turbid government
Edoardo Cavirani

16 Word-final onsets: a Brazilian Portuguese case study
Thaïs Cristófaro Silva

17 A note on the svarabhakti vowels in Connemara Irish
Michael Kenstowicz

18 Domino effects and licensing chains in government licensing: sequential NC clusters in Bantu
Nancy C. Kula

19 CəCj in French
Tobias Scheer

20 The prince and the nymph: interconsonantal plosive–zero alternation in English
Péter Szigetvári

Part 4: Prosodic structure and recursion

21 Structure and recursive approaches: a brief introduction
Connor Youngberg and Florian Breit

22 Nasal vowels in French: a precedence-free approach
Philip Backley and Kuniya Nasukawa

23 Recursive syllable structure in RCVP
Harry van der Hulst

Index