ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an interpretative survey of the comparative and historical data on the input, conditioning environment, and output of the phonetic process of metaphony. It argues that the cross-dialectal hierarchy of susceptibility to metaphonic assimilation which will emerge from this investigation reflects inherent properties of the phonetic process. The chapter demonstrates that metaphony is an essentially scalar, dynamic, unidirectional assimilatory process. It demonstrates that representations of metaphony specifying binary feature values, or which focus on the resolution of metaphony, rather than on the assimilatory process which is its basis, serve only to obscure its essentially dynamic nature. Moreover, they entail false predictions about subsequent historical developments of the phenomenon. An appropriate mode of representation must capture metaphony as a dynamic approximation towards the height position of the conditioning posttonic vowel.
