Atoms of segmental structure: components, gestures and dependency

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Abstract
In this article I discuss some aspects of a model of segmental structure, in particular the representation of vowels. The central claim is that vowels can be represented in terms of three unary primitives, organised in a binary structure involving both DOMINANCE and DEPENDENCY relations. My goal is to explore the consequences of this claim. Certain aspects of the proposal differ in matters of principle from the theory of segmental structure advanced in Chomsky & Halle (1968; henceforth SPE), and subsequent work in this tradition up to and including the ‘geometrical model’ as developed in Steriade (1982), Clements (1985), Sagey (1986), McCarthy (1988) and Halle (1988), even though it is argued in some of these works that certain features are unary, that they are organised hierarchically and that certain features enter into dependency relations.

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