This book provides an overview of phonological typology: the study of how sounds are distributed across the languages of the world and why they display these distributions and patterns. It examines major phonological phenomena such as phoneme inventories, syllable structure, phonological alternations, stress, tone, intonation, and prosodic morphology, and investigates issues including how common certain types of sounds are cross-linguistically and why; how many languages differentiate questions and statements using intonation; which areas of the world tend to be associated with more complex...

This book provides an overview of phonological typology: the study of how sounds are distributed across the languages of the world and why they display these distributions and patterns. It examines major phonological phenomena such as phoneme inventories, syllable structure, phonological alternations, stress, tone, intonation, and prosodic morphology, and investigates issues including how common certain types of sounds are cross-linguistically and why; how many languages differentiate questions and statements using intonation; which areas of the world tend to be associated with more complex...