An outline of Dependency Phonology

The purpose of this chapter is to offer an outline of Dependency Phonology ((hereafter DP) and present its main theses. Work within this model goes back to the early 1970s (J. M. Anderson and Jones 1974), and the first thorough application of DP was J. M. Anderson and Jones’s Phonological Structure and the History of English (1977), followed by Ewen’s important 1980 thesis: ‘Aspects of phonological structure with particular reference to English and Dutch’. In more recent years, the model has been tested against a variety of problems, data and languages. The reader is referred to J. M. Anderson and Ewen (1987) for a thorough discussion of DP and reasonably detailed syntheses are available in J. M. Anderson and Durand (1986) and Lass (1984). Moreover, two recent publications – J. M. Anderson and Durand (1987), Durand (1986a) – offer a wide range of articles which complement the reader edited by J. M. Anderson and Ewen in 1980. ¹