ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the two main areas of the theory, constituency and melody, and then turn to the application of the theory to the description of disordered speech. Government phonology is seen by its supporters to be within the generative tradition, and it shares with other approaches the insights and developments of feature geometry, autosegmental phonology, and metrical phonology. Government is the term used to describe the asymmetric relations between units. Melody is the term GovP uses for the segmental level of phonological description. In traditional generative phonology, the equivalent level uses the binary equipollent distinctive feature as the minimal unit of description. The other main difference with the primes of GovP compared to those of traditional generative approaches to phonology is that Government Phonology elements are phonetically interpretable; this is, the element itself has phonetic content that is pronounceable even if the element is not in a set of other elements.
