9310058 Broselow Research on the sound structure of human language has generally proceeded from two directions. Phoneticians have traditionally focused on creating abstract models of the mental representation of sound structure, with the ultimate goal of discovering universal constraints underlying the surface diversity of human language. With the increasing availability of sophisticated technology for speech analysis, these two strands of research have begun to converge, with the beneficial result that abstract phonological models can be tested against precise descriptions of sound properties. This project will investigate one candidate for a universal constraint on linguistic structure from both a phonological and a phonetic perspective; the goal is to compare the abstract representations motivated by phonological analysis against the phonetic properties revealed by instrumental analysis. The particular structures to be investigated are syllables of different types. It has long been recognized that syllables are one of the basic structural units of human language, and that syllable weight (the length of a syllable's vowel and the number of consonants following that vowel) plays a fundamental role in many grammatical processes, such as the positioning of stress and accent. One currently controversial issue concerns the number of distinctions in syllable weight to which languages make reference: while most languages seem to distinguish only two degrees of syllable weight, a few languages have been argued to require additional distinctions. The question of whether syllable weight distinctions are maximally binary reflects a more fundamental issue: since it has been proposed that no linguistic process requires reference to more than a binary distinction, limiting syllable weight distinctions to binary would be consistent with a significant constraint on possible variations across human languages. One approach to maintaining the claim that syllable wei ght distinctions are maximally binary involves the postulation of particular phonological representations for syllables that reduce all syllables to one of two categories: light vs. heavy. The project involves both detailed analysis of the phonological evidence for these abstract representations of syllable weight, and testing of the predictions made by these representations against the instrumental data available from phonetic analysis. ***
