Comaltepec Chinantec tone sandhi normally consists of rightward high tone spreading from syllables with a low-high tone pattern, and almost all sandhi outputs are non-neutralizing. This sound pattern may be understood by considering articulatory, aerodynamic, acoustic, and auditory principles, in necessary combination with phonetically rooted historical forces, and the principles of contrast maintenance, economy of effort, and what is termed pattern coherence.

Among the common strategies for eliminating vocalic hiatus is vowel elision. In some cases, it is the first vowel (V1) that elides, while in others it is the second (V2). Analyses of elision have, virtually without exception, simply stipulated which vowel is elided, for example, by encoding this information directly in a language-specific rule. This implies that the targeted position is not predictable, but simply a matter of which of two equally available options is selected by the language. A cross-linguistic study suggests, however, that this is not strictly the case, but that in some environments the choice of target is universally determined. This article accounts for the observed restrictions on elision target within a constraint-based theory which claims that languages preferentially preserve phonological elements in certain prominent positions.

The ‘time‘-away construction, exemplified by We slept the whole afternoon away, proves to have a complex set of syntactic and semantic properties. In particular, the NP the whole afternoon behaves syntactically like a direct object, even though it is clearly not licensed by the verb sleep. This construction is shown to be distinct from two others that it superficially resembles, the resultative and the way-construction. It is also compared with a number of other semi-idiomatic VP constructions. Two approaches for licensing the NP object are compared: a lexical rule approach, in which sleep away is treated as a complex verb that licenses the object, and a constructional approach, in which V NP away is listed as a meaning-bearing construction that licenses both the verb and the object.