Language in the mind: Phonological representations – new book

Cambridge University Press has just released my new book “Underlying Representations” in their series Key Topics in Phonology. You can order it here. It is available as hardcover and paperback.
To give you an idea of its contents, here is the blurb from the back cover:

At the heart of generative phonology lies the assumption that the sounds of every language have abstract underlying representations, which undergo various changes in order to generate the ‘surface’ representations; that is, the sounds we actually pronounce. The existence, status and form of underlying representations have been hotly debated in phonological research since the introduction of the phoneme in the nineteenth century. This book provides a comprehensive overview of theories of the mental representation of the sounds of language. How does the mind store and process phonological representations? Krämer surveys the development of the concept of underlying representation over the last 100 years or so within the field of generative phonology. He considers phonological patterns, psycholinguistic experiments, statistical generalisations over data corpora and phenomena such as hypercorrection. The book offers a new understanding of contrastive features and proposes a modification of the optimality-theoretic approach to the generation of underlying representations.

 

I received my PhD from the University of Düsseldorf in 2001 and lectured in phonetics and phonology at the University of Ulster at Jordanstown from 2001 to 2004, where I also took the Post-Graduate Certificate in University Teaching. In 2004 I took up a position as Associate Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Tromsø (UiT). From 2008 to 2012 I was Associate Professor in General Linguistics at UiT. Since August 2012 I am a Professor of Linguistics at UiT.