Fast speech in a monostratal model of postlexical phonology

Abstract

Fast speech has largely been ignored by theoretical linguists. The literature is scant. In this paper, however, I will argue that fast speech has some properties phonology has to account for: first, the differences between the formal style (which is the speech level that is taken as the basis of phonological descriptions) and the fast speech level are systematic. Second, the phonology has to deal with is the large amount of variation within fast speech.
The general idea I propose is that the differences in speech rate or style do not result from different rule orderings, but from different domain sizes, on which one single block of rules applies. By comparing fast speech phonology to the phonology of (simple) cliticization, I will show that postlexical phonology provides further evidence for the prosodic view of cliticization (see Booij (ms); Lahiri et al. (1990)).