The Phonology of English: A Prosodic Optimality-Theoretic Approach (The Phonology of the World's Languages)

This book offers a new approach to English phonology. It focuses on the prosody of the language, i.e. syllable and foot structure, and does so from an optimality-theoretic (OT) perspective. The focus is on surface distributional regularities and the results presented are based on extensive searches through various computerized lexicons. The outcome is a number of new generalizations about the phonology of English, along with confirmation of some familiar regularities. All of these empirical results are discussed in detail and presented in extensive charts with a plethora of examples. English Phonology also offers a unique OT analysis. This provides a detailed introduction to the intricacies of the theory as applied to a significant amount of data. A number of important theoretical proposals are developed in this model, and the analysis presents the idea that certain complex constraints and their ranking can be derived in restricted ways from more basic constraints. In addition, the book also develops the idea that syllables of English can contain from zero to three moras. It is suggested that the phonology of English only makes sense if partial morphemes of the cranberry sort are licensed more widely. The book is thus intended as a detailed presentation of novel empirical results about the sound system of English, along with important theoretical results about phonological theory.