Kuniya Nasukawa (ed.) (2020). Morpheme-internal recursion in phonology. (Studies in Generative Grammar 140.) Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Pp. ix + 415.

Abstract

Recursion is a key concept in both the organisation and the origin of language, claims Kuniya Nasukawa, the editor of this collection of papers (p. 1). If this is indeed the case, recursion ought to be found not only in syntax, but also in phonology. Phonologists are divided on whether phonology ‘proper’, i.e. the structure of syllables and segments, in fact involves recursion. The papers presented in this volume all address this question in greater or lesser detail. With one exception, Clemens Poppe, all authors conclude that phonology does involve recursion. Half of the papers were first presented at a workshop entitled ‘Recursion in phonology’, which was held in 2016 at Tohoku Gakuin University, Sendai; the others were written for this volume. The ‘morpheme-internal’ in the title of the volume is revealing and relevant. Recursive structures have been applied to rhythmic patters in phonology before, but Scheer (2011) and Nasukawa (2015) argue that these structures reflect (morpho-)syntactic rather than phonological structure. Most of the discussion in the present book is restricted to recursion within morphemes, where morphology and syntax have no role to play. The aim of the volume is to initiate a debate by taking a firm stand on the side of those arguing for the existence of morpheme-internal recursion in phonological representations. The book comprises an introduction by the editor and twelve papers by sixteen authors. Most of the papers discuss phonotactics and the representation of vowels and consonants, and of syllable structure. Three of the papers consider stress at some length, and one discusses the influence of adjacent consonants on tone. However, in most papers these topics are intertwined: tone and the laryngeal specification of consonants are intimately related issues, as are vocalic elements and the place specification of consonants, and vowel complexity and stress. It is hard, if not impossible, to set up any thematic classification. The papers of the volume are arranged in alphabetical order; I will follow this order below. Phillip Backley & Kuniya Nasukawa (pp. 11–36) discuss the representation of both vowels and consonants. They assert that prosodic units like the nucleus or the syllable are projections of melodic elements, so that a word is ultimately a projection of one of its vowels. A polysyllabic word thus involves several layers of recursive structures: one vowel may be a dependent of another vowel. Furthermore, several instances of the same phonological element are claimed to participate in the make-up of a single vowel. Another syntax-like feature of their framework is the assumption that it is the dependents that contribute linguistic information; heads are mostly just structural elements of the representation. A consonant is therefore a dependent of a following vowel, and, somewhat unexpectedly, a stressed vowel or syllable is a dependent of an unstressed one.