The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.
Prosodic Phonology by Marina Nespor and Irene Vogel is finally available again. "Nespor & Vogel 1986" is a citation classic, and even after twenty years, it is still recognized as the standard resource on Prosodic Phonology. This groundbreaking work introduces all of the prosodic domains (syllable, foot, word, clitic group, phonological phrase, intonational phrase and utterance) and comments on the evidence in their favor from numerous languages. It also contains a chapter on the phonology of poetic meter, and a chapter on the experimental testing of the role of the prosodic constituents in the perception of ambiguous sentences. The book is an important reference not only for all phonologists, but for all linguists interested in the problem of interfaces. It is a basic resource also for psycholinguists and for cognitive scientists working on perception of language and language acquisition.
Marina Nespor, University of Ferrara, Italy; Irene Vogel, University of Delaware, USA.
