The Lexical Phonology of Slovak by Jerzy Rubach (Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Department of Linguistics, Professor of Linguistics and Head of the Department of Linguistics, University of Warsaw)
This book has both a descriptive and a theoretical purpose. It is the first full phonological description of Slovak, a language spoken by some four-and-a-half million people in Central and Eastern Europe; and it is a study of the theories of lexical, autosegmental, and prosodic phonology, with a particular emphasis on syllable structure. In a synthesis of these two aims, the author demonstrates how the theories can be integrated in a description of a single language. Particular importance is attached to the problem of phonological representations which, it is shown, must be three-dimensional. Both the independence and the interaction of the melodic, skeletal, and syllabic tiers are investigated in detail. The theoretical linguist will find here a detailed and comprehensive description of the language, deepened by an extensive debate on current phonological theory. For the Slavicist - of whatever theoretical persuasion - the book offers a discussion of the most recent theoretical developments in phonology, couched in the framework of a familiar type of linguistic material.