Abstract
AbstractWe place the healthy diversity of current (i.e., early 21st-century) phonological theory under scrutiny, and identify the four fundamental approaches that make it up: Rule-Based Phonology, Representation-Based Phonology, Constraint-Based Phonology, and Usage-Based Phonology. We then focus on the key aspects of and recent developments in Representation-Based Phonology: we separate out hybrid models and purely representational ones, we identify Government Phonology (GP) as the most popular form of the latter (and show that it is even present in what we call ‘GP-friendly’ analyses), and finally, we discuss and illustrate recent innovations in both subsegmental and prosodic structure in the two strands that we identify as ‘hyperhierarchical’ (or ‘vertical’) and ‘flat’ (or ‘horizontal’).
Highlights
The current theoretical landscape in phonology is healthily diverse
We can identify four major currents in present-day phonological theory: Rule-Based Phonology (RBP), Representation-Based Phonology (RepBP), Constraint-Based Phonology (CBP), and Usage-Based-Phonology (UBP), all of which can be seen as diffuse ‘theory groups’
The fundamental hallmark of RepBP is a subscription to autosegmentalism, and RepBP-type frameworks include two major related strands, Dependency Phonology (DP) and Government Phonology (GP), and currently form a substantial minority position in Europe (e.g., Scheer 2004), and a few other places
Summary
The current theoretical landscape in phonology (at the end of the second decade of the 21st century) is healthily diverse (cf. Hannahs & Bosch 2017, chapter 1). The largest annual phonology conference is the Manchester Phonology Meeting (the ‘mfm’ – see www.lel.ed.ac.uk/mfm), which has occurred each year for a quarter of a century, with a steady number of around 80 presentations in recent years, and with participation from all around the world. Sebregts (2017) analysed the presentations given at the first 25 mfms, and identified quite steady proportions of talks from a number of different theoretical perspectives over the last decade, with no individual perspective taking up. Katalin Balogné Bérces & Patrick Honeybone much more than 40% of the presentations. This paper analyses this diversity of approach in the current landscape of phonological theory and recognises four fundamental strands..
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