Preface: complexity in phonological representations

The notion of complexity, though seldom characterized explicitly, plays an important role in much work in phonology. At the segmental level, it is often claimed that certain segments occur more or less frequently in the languages of the world, or do or do not tend to participate in certain phonological processes because of their internal complexity. At the prosodic level, constituents may be more or less complex in various ways, and their relative complexity influences what positions they may appear in. Besides accounting for asymmetries in the observed distribution of segmental and prosodic systems, considerations of segmental and prosodic complexity might be expected to playa role in the course of language acquisition, with simple representations preceding more complex ones at various levels of grammar