Blackwell Reference Online

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In this first chapter, I would like to bring together the issues joined and the proposals encountered in the range of papers that follow. These papers discuss a broad range of topics, often cross-referencing each other, usually by way of support, though there is some controversy, which I will highlight in the course of in this chapter. The most effective way to bring out the general unity is to step back and formulate the questions that our current theories are intended to answer. I would suggest that the following three questions lie behind most of the work that we find in phonological theory: 1  What constitutes a phonological word in a given language? Many of the things we do in analyzing the phonology of a language are part of the effort to answer this question: we characterize and make an inventory of the sounds in the language, how the sounds can be combined to form syllables and words, what the stress patterns are like in the language, and so on. Conditions on well-formed phonological words have traditionally been called phonotactics . 2  What is the nature of alternations , that is, the differences in phonological form that we observe in the realization of a morpheme in different contexts? From the phonologist's point of view, what we mean by “context” may be phonological or morphological, and both kinds of context are important in determining the phonological realization ... log in or subscribe to read full text