The Special Status of Coronals : Internal and External Evidence (Phonetics and Phonology, Volume 2)

This carefully crafted volume appeals to a wide audience of phonologists, general linguists, and psycholinguists. Phonologists and psycholinguists turn to this book as an essential tool to evaluate competing theories of markedness and segmental structure. General linguists find modern answers to traditional questions, with a view to applying the results to historical linguistics, acquisition theories, and phonetics. Seven of the ten papers concentrate on internal evidence (phonological arguments) and the other three are based on external evidence (normal and aphasic speech errors) and phonetics.
This combination of internal and external evidence aims at settling numerous claims, often unsubstantiated or even contradictory, to the effect that the special status of coronals is reflected both in phonology proper and in connected domains. The importance of the problems raised by coronals, the perspectives from which these problems are approached, and the quality of contributions make this book a standard reference work in phonology and general linguistics.