Abstract The chapters of this book are free-standing but closely linked pieces on the shortcomings of one-dimensional idealizations of language. Theories of both phonology and syntax rely heavily on the assumption that the objects they are modelling are formally strings of elements. Many well-known linguistic phenomena make problems for this assumption (e.g. vowel harmony, ablaut morphology, pitch features both tonal and intonational), and many attempts have been made to incorporate these troublesome characteristics into our models (e.g. autosegmental phonology), but much theoretical effort in linguistics continues to be directed toward accounting for properties of strings. The chapters assembled here deal with various aspects of the problematical non-sequential phenomena. The topics covered include distinctive features, systematic phonetics, the definition of ‘prosody’, aspects of vocal paralinguistic communication and ‘gradience’, and duality of patterning. Each chapter reviews a wide range of relevant literature, generally going back to the beginnings of modern linguistics in the early twentieth century.
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