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This chapter discusses several phonological accounts of sentential stress, according to which some language-specific phonological rule determines which word receives the highest prominence in the sentence. It provides several conceptual and empirical arguments against these accounts.

Language is both cognitive and sociocultural, consisting in conventionally sanctioned patterns of communicative activity. These patterns take the form of schemas abstracted from usage events by the reinforcement of recurring commonalities. Conventional linguistic units are linked by relationships of composition and categorization (either elaboration or extension) and thus form intersecting networks of great complexity. Expressions are interpreted and assessed for well-formedness through categorization by linguistic units. Through a process of interactive activation, particular units are selected to categorize particular facets of an expression. The total set of categorizing relationships constitutes the expression's structural description, and whether the categorizations involve elaboration or extension determines its degree of conventionality. Despite the absence of explicit prohibitions, this model affords an account of distribution, restrictions, and judgments of ungrammaticality. One aspect of grammatical constructions is their characterization at different levels of specificity, including constructional subschemas incorporating specific lexical items. And since one aspect of lexical items is their occurrence in particular constructions, lexicon and grammar are overlapping rather than disjoint. The model accommodates degrees and kinds of regularity, which decomposes into generality, productivity, and compositionality. Regularities include higher-order generalizations, where sets of categorizations or lexical behaviors are themselves schematized to form productive patterns. Among the phenomena described in this manner are patterns of phonological extension (phonological rules), patterns of semantic extension (e.g. general metonymies), and patterns of morphological realization (like conjugation classes).

This chapter draws together results and suggests that the accentual stability of very frequent words and of words containing frequent and synchronically recognized suffixes both result from the stability of lexical accents attaching to frequently occurring morphemes, whether lexical stems or suffixes. Further classes of Greek word are suggested (deverbative ā-stems; personal names) whose accentuation might have been influenced by the loss of analysis and the subsequent accentual regularization, and accentual phenomena in Latin and English are compared. Consequences for Indo-European, linguistic theory, and the understanding of accentual change are explored. A final section argues that the results do not prove the literal existence of synchronic phonological rules, but could also be expressed in terms of analogy-based morphological processing.

This chapter provides an overview of the Korean prosodic system and introduces the most updated version of K-ToBI (Korean Tones and Break Indices). Korean has two prosodic units marked by intonation: the Accentual Phrase (AP) and the Intonation Phrase (IP). An IP is marked by phrase final lengthening and a final boundary tone. An AP is typically marked by a phrase-final rise contour but the tonal contour can vary depending on the size of an AP and the meaning. Unlike English pitch accent, the tones forming an AP are not distinctive, nor predictable. This motivated a major change in the tone tier of Korean ToBI: a split into a phonological tone tier and a phonetic tone tier. A phonological tone tier labels the prosodic structure and a phonetic tone tier labels the surface tonal pattern of each prosodic unit. Finally, the chapter presents labeller agreement data.

One of the longstanding puzzles in generative phonology is the so-called Nonderived Environment Blocking (NDEB), proposed by Paul Kiparsky. Based on NDEB, some phonological rules apply only in derived environments—that is, across a morpheme boundary or if fed by an earlier phonological rule—but are blocked in other cases. According to Kiparsky, rules that are both cyclic and lexical apply in nonderived environments. This is supported by the optional rule of Vowel Coalescence in Colloquial Helsinki Finnish. This chapter examines the Finnish evidence based on a corpus of spoken Helsinki Finnish encompassing 126 speakers and approximately 500,000 word forms. It argues that there is no relation between derived environment behavior and any kind of phonological rules, analyzes the Finnish evidence in terms of Optimality Theory, and suggests that NDEB arises from root faithfulness relativized to markedness.

This chapter describes a theory of phonology that employs ordered rules and illustrates how it accounts for certain complex phenomena central to the phonologies of three Slavic languages: Russian, Czech, and Serbo-Croatian. It considers three important principles of phonological rule application, assumes that such application is preceded by morphological structure building, and argues that all Slavic nouns have the tripartite form Root + Theme + Case-Number. The chapter also looks at the genitive plural form of nouns in the Slavic languages.

This chapter examines Nonderived Environment Blocking (NDEB) in the context of the phonological rule known as Korean Palatalization, which shows NDEB effects and applies only in environments derived by virtue of a combination of morphemes. It discusses Korean Palatalization both diachronically and synchronically, and argues that derived environments arise from a change in the ranking of lexical faithfulness constraints. The chapter also suggests that NDEB is not a rigid principle of grammar but a language-specific consequence of the way individual phonological rules are stated or constraints are ranked in a particular grammar.

This chapter examines the No Crossing Constraint, constraints on feature spreading, and the application of phonological rules in structures with “long-distance geminates.” McCarthy’s work on nonconcatenative Semitic morphology plays a central role. It shows that known constraints on feature spreading imply that feature spreading can take place in crossed structures only in very special environments, accounting for why attested instances of overapplication are rare.

This chapter casts doubt on the empirical data that Chomsky (2008) provides in favor of feature inheritance and parallel movement, and shows there are empirical and conceptual reasons to reject this implementation of the idea that the formal features in C and T originate in a single head position. This does not imply, however, that the latter idea should be completely rejected. There are reasons to assume that the relevant features all originate in the T-head, and that the C-position may come into existence as a result of the remerge of T as a specific instantiation of the formation of extended projections in the sense of Grimshaw (1997). The extended projection approach is preferred to the feature inheritance approach in terms of optimization/economy given that for subject-initial sentences, CP structures are normally harmonically bounded by TP structures due to the fact that they invoke additional violations of *MOVE and *MERGE.