It is generally agreed among French linguists that the word has no phonetic or phonological status in French. This position reflects mostly pedagogical considerations and preoccupation with surface phonetic facts and demarcative signals. Investigation of processes of a more abstract nature reveals, however, that a certain number of rules…

In polysyllabic segments, the composition of medial clusters is a reflection of morpheme structure constraints as they apply to initial and final groups of syllables. Also, medial clusters ideally overlap, i.e., have simultaneous membership in both the preceding and following syllable segments. (DB)

French linguists generally agree that the word in French has no phonetic or phonological status. This article examines this position and studies several vowel-consonant sequences, mute-"e" deletion and post-consonantal deletion and suggests that the role of French word-boundaries is more important than is generally acknowledged. (CHK)

The paper presents a set of linguistic phenomena illustrative of the notion "universal tendency". Linguistic generalizations are regarded here not as isolated, "true-or-false" propositions but as embedded in a hierarchy of competing forces. An "exception" to a universal is thus seen as the result of the prevalence of another conflicting universal…

This paper argues that the origin of the tonal accents in Low German, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian can be explained on the basis of segmental circumstances, that they may be considered as secondary in the historical development of these languages, and that they arise when the redundant tonal transition in centering diphthongs becomes distinctive…