Bruce Moren

Patrik Bye

Formal studies of phonology are often organized along the prosodic hierarchy, with research ranging from the feature, at the low end of the hierarchy, to the phrase, at the top. Two subprojects of this type will receive our initial focus. One subproject studies parameters of segment strength, including topics such as vowel reduction and deletion, epenthesis, consonant gradation, and positional effects. The task will be to find universal perceptual and articulatory constraints or parameters that can account for these kind of facts in a wider range of different languages, building on work already in progress in Tromsø on Sami, Norwegian, English, Russian, and French. The second subproject focuses on prosodic phonology and morphology, especially studies of syllable structure and stress. In this context, we also pursue the identification of parameters and constraints which characterize the phonology of these levels of the prosodic hierarchy.