Table of Contents

1: Introduction 2: Theory and explanation in phonological typology 3: Phoneme inventories 4: Syllables 5: Segmental processes 6: Stress 7: Tone and intonation 8: Prosodic morphology 9: Conclusions

About the Author

Matthew K. Gordon is Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on phonological theory, typology, and the phonetic and phonological documentation of endangered languages. Much of his work deals with prosodic properties such as stress, syllable weight, and intonation. He is the author of Syllable Weight: Phonetics, Phonology, Typology (Routledge, 2006) and co-editor of Topic and Focus: Cross-linguistic
Perspectives on Intonation and Meaning (Springer, 2007).

Reviews

a valuable survey of crosslinguistic variation in phonology and an extremely useful source of information about within-language frequency ... [It] will be at its most useful in advanced undergraduate phonology classes and introductory graduate courses.
*Paul V de Lacy, Language*

This book constitutes an important contribution to the field of phonological typology. It also provides a unified description of some apparently unrelated phonological phenomena, therefore contributing to understanding the subsystem interface.
*Yolanda Rivera Castillo, LINGUIST List*