Though the concept of syllabic segmentation has regained a firm footing in the phonology of Standard German since the early 1990s, all attempts undertaken so far have failed to provide convincing evidence of a phonetic correlate for the syllabic segment. On the basis of empirical investigations on Standard German the present study establishes just such a correlate, identifiable from the characteristics of the energy curves traceable in different kinds of vowel. Analyses of dialectal language data form the basis for a classification of German dialects in terms of the existence of a phonetic...

This monograph provides the first cross-linguistic study of repair strategies in verbal fronting, verb doubling and do-support, addressing both typological properties and theoretical aspects. First, it brings together data hitherto scattered across the empirical and theoretical literature and adds newly collected data from two African languages. For each of the 47 languages, the properties of verbal fronting are documented in detail. Based on this sample, the empirical part establishes two novel typological generalizations regarding the interaction between the size of the fronted category...