Phonology

Written as a teaching text, this volume takes readers through phonology in a deliberate sequence, opening with simple illustrative cases and building toward harder material. Its exercises draw on well-known datasets from the literature alongside problems written specifically for the book, all aimed at training students to find regular sound patterns hidden inside messy language data.

The topics run from alternations and vowel harmony to phonemic analysis, natural classes, and distinctive features. Later chapters take up abstractness and opacity, syllable structure, tone, stress, prosodic morphology, feature geometry, and optimality theory. The writing is clear and practical, which suits it to classroom use and independent study alike, and it is intended for linguistics students anywhere in the world.