Author Description

This book offers a new approach to English phonology. It focuses on the prosody of the language, i.e. syllable and foot structure, and does so from an optimality-theoretic (OT) perspective. The Phonology of English also offers a unique OT analysis. This provides a detailed introduction to the intricacies of the theory as applied to a significant amount of data. A number of important theoretical proposals are developed in this model, and the analysis presents the idea that certain complex constraints and their ranking can be derived in restricted ways from more basic constraints. In addition, the book also develops the idea that syllables of English can contain from zero to three moras. It is suggested that the phonology of English only makes sense if partial morphemes of the cranberry sort are licensed more widely.