Melodic Heads in Element Theory (Kaye et al. 1985; Harris & Lindsey 1995; Backley 2011) have long been associated with higher acoustic saliency of the headed prime’s properties (Lindsey & Harris 1990; Backley 1995; Harris & Lindsey 1995; et alia) and with the relative strength (e.g. alignment of melodic heads with strong positions and robustness of headed expressions against lenition) of a melodic head compared to a dependent (e.g. Backley & Nasukawa 2009). Following substantial work on the interaction of voicing and nasality (Nasukawa 1997, 2005; Ploch 1999; Botma 2004) it is commonly assumed that voicing and nasality are both represented by the same prime |L|, with dependent |L| encoding nasality and headed |L| encoding voicing. In this paper I counter some of the arguments for the universality of this implementation, and develop an alternative view of a unified voicing–nasality prime, in which voicing is encoded by dependent |L| and nasality by headed |L|. I show how this analysis is more consistent with both the saliency and strength arguments by considering arguments based on the represented acoustic patterns, positional strength, nasal sharing (nasal harmony within onset–nucleus pairs), and cross-linguistic biases against loss of nasality. Finally, I show how this account is compatible with a more restrictive, recursive view of the phonological interpretation component following the set theoretic model of Element Theory in Breit (2013). Based on these arguments I conclude that we have good reason to doubt the universality of Nasukawa (1997, 2005) and Ploch’s (1999) implementation; instead we must give serious consideration to the reverse option with headed |L| for nasality and dependent |L| for voicing. I suggest that there are two possible responses to this situation: we can either make the attempt to radically adopt the alternative, or we can adopt a more relativistic position (in the sense of Cyran 2011, 2014) which allows a choice between both options. This article is part of the Special Collection: Headedness in Phonology

This chapter presents an overview of our current understanding of the nature of the phonological primitives, the smallest units at the core of phonological representation and computation. We argue that there are many more open questions about the primitives than there is agreement. We discuss many of the fundamental questions faced by phonological theory on various aspects of phonological features, ranging from their formal structural properties (e.g. types of opposition, valency, atomicity), to their relationship with phonetic correlates (e.g. representationalism, articulatory vs acoustic correlates, substance), to their origins (e.g. innateness, emergence), taking into account a large range of positions on each of the issues discussed. We show that despite significant fragmentation on many of these issues, there is also much common ground which should leave us optimistic about progress on the many questions that remain open.

There is no lack of article-length publications on individual aspects of Welsh phonology.* However, it has been a long wait for a book-length overview, especially one that incorporates modern theoretical insights. Hannahs' new book is thus a welcome addition to the Phonology of the World's Languages series. As with other volumes in the series, the author sets out to strike a balance between theory-neutral description and theoretically informed analysis. His framework of choice is Optimality Theory. The book will be of interest to specialist phonologists, Celticists, and linguists with a non-specialist interest in Welsh. The book is divided into seven chapters : an introduction to the history of Welsh and its modern dialects, a phonetic outline, four core chapters on phonology and a final chapter touching on phenomena and issues not addressed elsewhere in the book. Chapter 2 provides a compact but comprehensive overview of Welsh phonetics, including outlines of the consonant and vowel inventories of the main dialects (Hannahs accepts the established broad division into northern and southern varieties). Particularly welcome here are the author's succinct discussions of a range of phenomena that have not always been clearly described elsewhere, including voicing in stops, gemination, the status of affricates, vowel length and schwa. The chapter provides the reader with a very useful entry to the relevant literature. In Chapter 3, Hannahs presents his analysis of the prosodic structure of the word in Welsh. His description of syllable structure follows well-established practice in two respects: (a) it is based almost entirely on the monosyllabic word, and (b) it assumes that consonant-cluster phonotactics are syllabically conditioned. This approach gives rise to certain anomalies, by no means peculiar to Welsh. For one thing, it leads to the claim that consonant clusters at the end of words form complex codas. If these really are syllabic constituents, defined independently of words, we expect them also to occur elsewhere in the word. The same clusters do indeed also occur medially, but here they pattern in two ways, neither of which is consistent with complex coda status. Some are clearly heterosyllabic. For example, when internal, clusters of falling