volume: 4 (2000)
pages: 1–18
author: András Cser
title: Phonological models of sonority
abstract: Sonority is one of those central notions of phonological theory that are inevitably referred to in the analysis and discussion of various problems but are, at the same time, basically ill-defined, with an unknown basis somewhere in the vocalisation makeup or the phonological design of natural language. The purpose of this paper is to survey the phonological models that have been proposed and to evaluate them without, of course, pretending to be able to give decisive judgements. We readily admit that we have no adequate solution to the phonological modelling of sonority; however, we do not find this worrying, since we are not at all convinced that sonority actually has to be modelled in the phonology. It may well be that sonority has a solid phonetic basis whose outlines are not yet quite clear to us — discussion of this question remains for others. In this paper we first say a few words about sonority and point to a couple of very general problems related to it, then list briefly the phonological phenomena that involve sonority, finally we expatiate upon eight models proposed by adherents of various theories.
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