to appear in

The growing interest in the syllable as a phonological unit has spawned the publication of two large volumes in recent years. While van der Hulst and Ritter (1999, reviewed by Utz Maas in this journal, ZS 23, 117-123) primarily features articles written in the perspective of Government Phonology, the present volume contains exclusively papers written in Optimality Theory (OT), the framework that is largely responsible for the recent revival of the syllable. The Syllable in Optimality Theory originated in a conference held in Tübingen already in 1998. This is a long publication delay for a short-lived discipline, and it is a pity that one can hardly find a reference that is more recent than 1999. The volume contains 14 original contributions by well-known specialists, and author, subject and language indexes are provided for the reader’s orientation. The papers, all of them high-quality, cover a broad range of topics and an impressive range of languages and dialects. The reader finds enlightening discussions of standard problems such as opacity, moraicity, ambisyllabicity, or (violations of) the strict layering hypthesis, but new issues and ideas seem to lurk behind every corne