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The essays in this volume address foundational questions in phonology that cut across different schools of thought within the discipline. The theme of modularity runs through them all, however, and these essays demonstrate the benefits of the modular approach to phonology, either investigating interactions among distinct modules or developing specific aspects of representation within a particular module. Although the contributors take divergent views on a range of issues, they agree on the importance of representations and questions of modularity in phonology. Their essays address the status of phonological features, syllable theory, metrical structure, the architecture of the phonological component, and interaction among components of phonology. In the early 1990s the rise of Optimality Theory—which suggested that pure computation would solve the problems of representations and modularity—eclipsed the centrality of these issues for phonology. This book offers a coherent view of phonology that is not based on Optimality Theory. The chapters demonstrate that computation and representation are inherently linked; they do not deny Optimality Theory, but attempt to move the field of phonology beyond it.

This book is a description of English as it is spoken in New Zealand. New Zealand English (NZE) is one of the youngest native-speaker varieties of English, and is the only variety of English where there is recorded evidence of its entire history. It shares some features with other Southern Hemisphere varieties of English such as Australian English and South African English, but is also clearly distinct from these. For the past two decades, extensive research has focused on the evolution and ongoing development of the variety. The book presents the results of this research in an accessible way. It includes: an account of the phonetic, phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical, and discourse features that are characteristic of the dialect; a discussion of the historical development of NZE; a description of the current social and regional variation within the variety; an indication of the areas where change is currently occurring; and sample texts and an annotated bibliography of relevant literature. There are also several associated audio files, which provide examples of many of the phenomena discussed, at http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/dialects/.

This study determines a system of phonological features that is minimally sufficient to distinguish all consonants and vowels in the world’s languages. It differs from previous studies in several ways. First, evidence is drawn from two databases, UPSID (451 sound inventories) and P-base (628 sound inventories), while many previous studies do not use large datasets. Second, interpreting phonetic transcriptions from different languages has been an outstanding problem. This study proposes a solution, using the notion of contrast: X and Y are different sounds if and only if they contrast in some language (i.e. distinguish words in that language). Third, previous studies often focus on theoretical assumptions, such as whether features are binary or innate. In contrast, this study focuses on a simple procedure to interpret empirical data: For each phonetic dimension (feature), we search through all inventories in order to determine the maximal number of contrasts required. In addition, every unusual feature or extra degree of contrast is re-examined in order to confirm its validity. The resulting feature system is surprisingly simple: Fewer features are needed than previously proposed, and for each feature, a two-way contrast is sufficient. While simpler than even the most parsimonious previous feature theory, our proposal is reliable, in that the notion of contrast is uncontroversial, the procedure is explicit, and the result is repeatable. I also discuss non-contrastive differences between languages, sound classes (‘natural classes’), and complex sounds (affricates, consonant–glide units, consonant–liquid units, contour tones, pre-nasalized stops, clicks, ejectives, and implosives).