John Anderson and Colin Ewen, two of the most notable exponents of
'dependency phonology', present in this book a detailed account of this
integrated model for the representational of segmental and
suprasegmental structure in phonology. Dependency phonology departs from
traditional 'linear' models of phonology, and the more recent non-linear
models of autosegmental and metrical phonology, in several respects.
Unlike in these models, suprasegmental structure is derived directly
from the segmental representations, and these representations are based
on single-valued features, or components (rather than Chomsky and
Halle-type binary features), linked by the dependency relation to form
suprasegmental structures, with the exact nature of the dependency
relations being directly determined by the properties of the segmental
structure. Phonology is currently noteworthy for the diversity of views
within the discipline, but no linguist or phonetician with a serious
interest in phonology can afford to ignore this book or fail to be
interested by it.