Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology

by John A. Goldsmith

This book sets out to explain developments in the field of non-linear phonology that have taken place since the mid 1970s. It sees phonology as compromising several "tiers", each tier consisting of a linear arrangement of segments; these are linked to each other by association lines which indicate how they are to be co-articulated. Originally devised to handle tonal phenomena, the approach has been extended to deal with other features whose scope is more than one segment, especially vowel and consonant harmony. The book opens with a discussion of tonal systems, moving on to a look at problems of vowel length and geminate consonants from an autosegmental perspective and to introduce the notion of a skeletal tier. The third chapter deals with the treatment of the syllable leading to a discussion of metrical theory. The fifth chapter considers lexical phonology and the final chapter considers some of the more interesting developments in the field.

Genres: Linguistics

376 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1989

About the author

John Anton Goldsmith is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, with appointments in linguistics and computer science. He was educated at Swarthmore College, where he obtained his B.A. in 1972, and at MIT, where he completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics under Morris Halle in 1976. He was on the faculty at the Department of Linguistics at Indiana University, before joining the University of Chicago in 1984. He has also taught at the LSA Linguistic Institutes and has held visiting appointments at McGill, Harvard, and UCSD, among others. In 2007, Goldsmith was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Goldsmith's research ranges from phonology to computational linguistics. His Ph.D thesis introduced autosegmental phonology, which regards phonological phenomena as a collection of parallel tiers with individual segments representing certain features of speech. His recent research deals with unsupervised learning of linguistic structure (particularly exemplified by his Linguistica project, a body of software which attempts to automatically analyze the morphology of a language), as well as in extending computational linguistics algorithms to bioinformatics.

Reviews

[Rachid asmai]

awkward but enjoyable :)

[كادي حكمت · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant