Autosegmental phonology

The working hypothesis of autosegmental analysis is that a large part of phonological generalizations can be interpreted as a restructuring or reorganization of the autosegments in a representation.

A few years later, John McCarthy proposed an important development by showing that the derivation of words from consonantal roots in Arabic could be analyzed autosegmentally.

In the first decade of the development of the theory, G. N. Clements developed a number of influential aspects of the theory involving harmonic processes, especially vowel harmony and nasal harmony, and John McCarthy generalized the theory to deal with the conjugational system of classical Arabic, on the basis of an autosegmental account of vowel and consonant slots on a central timing tier (see also nonconcatenative morphology).

Environments can be shown by placing other connected sets of features around that which is the focus of the rule.

Rather than classify segments using the categories given in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the autosegmental formalism makes use of distinctive features, which provide greater granularity and make identification of natural classes easier.

In the autosegmental formalism, this is depicted by placing the binary subfeature at a horizontal offset from the unary feature and connecting them with a line.

For example, a generic place feature can be indicated [...]P. The autosegmental formalism deals with several separate linear sequences; because of this, a phonological representation is depicted on several distinct tiers.

Many of the most interesting predictions of the autosegmental model derive from the automatic effects of the Well-formedness Condition and their independence of language-particular rules.