This paper presents new experimental data on Quito Spanish /s/-voicing, which has attracted considerable interest from theoretical phonologists owing to the overapplication of voicing to word-final pre-vocalic /s/. Bermúdez-Otero (2011) singles out Quito /s/-voicing as an important test case for discriminating between two competing theories of phonology–morphosyntax interactions: Output–output correspondence and cyclicity. Overapplication in /s/-voicing cannot be captured using correspondence relationship to a base form, which challenges Output–output correspondence as a theory of opacity. However, the argument only holds insofar as word-final pre-vocalic /s/-voicing is considered phonological, as Output–output correspondence can account for /s/-voicing assuming that it only applies in the phonetics (Colina 2009). We discuss the diverging empirical predictions concerning categoricity and gradience in the surface realisation of voicing processes. We further test these predictions based on acoustic data from seven speakers of Quito Spanish. Evidence from speech rate manipulations shows that some speakers produce more voicing during frication at normal speech rate, compared to fast, maintaining a stable voicing ratio across different speech rates. We argue that for these speakers, /s/-voicing is optional but categorical, and so it ought to be analysed as phonological. This result presents a challenge to the Output–output correspondence approach, but can be accommodated within cyclicity.

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.

Phonological processes typically affect natural classes of sounds, with the members of such classes sharing some phonetic property to the exclusion of other sounds. Recent typological work shows that not all phonological classes are natural, however (Mielke 2008). This paper considers the class of glides and laryngeals, a combination of sounds which resists a straightforward characterization in terms of shared features. Adopting the framework of Element Theory (Harris & Lindsey 1995; Backley 2011), we argue that class behaviour of glides and laryngeals is due not to their having shared phonetic content, but shared phonological structure: glides and laryngeals contain a single element in their melodic structure. We conclude that phonological processes can be sensitive to the difference between simple and complex expressions.

This chapter proposes that an account of the acquisition of the segment inventory cannot be successful if it targets solely the representational side, as previous accounts have tended to do. However, both representation and derivation (computation) are necessary and integral parts of any phonological system. With this in mind, the chapter puts forth a framework in which the acquisition of distinctive features develops in tandem with a set of highly simple constraints that govern how these features may combine to form segments. Using only monovalent features and binary Feature Co-occurrence Constrains, it is shown that the acquisition of the Dutch consonant inventory can be successfully accounted for.

Typological work shows that voiced fricatives like /β ð/ occur more often without their voiceless counterparts than with them, contrary to what would be expected on the basis of markedness relations between voicing and obstruents. This paper suggests that many of the offending fricatives are more appropriately viewed as sonorants, whose unmarked status is to be voiced. This view has an important consequence for the interpretation of intervocalic voicing (e.g. afa > ava), which we suspect is the diachronic origin of most of the fricatives in our corpus. We propose that intervocalic voicing is sonorization, formalized in terms of the suppression of melodic material.