Underspecification, polysystemicity, and nonsegmental representations in phonology: an analysis of Malay

An analysis of the phonological system of Malay that does not assume the segmental phoneme as its base, following the tradition of John Rupert Firth (1948) in that it establishes different systems at different points in the syllable. The lowest level at which segmentation is allowed is that of syllable places, Cs & Vs. Prosodic features are measured in terms of Cs & Vs, the feature array being separated into different layers relating to the various parameters of speech, eg, phonation & place of articulation. In addition, phonological rules are nondestructive in nature; they can only build structure, not alter it or delete it. As a consequence of this requirement, phonological representations in the lexicon are highly underspecified. 50 References. Adapted from the source document