Nick Clements

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George N. (Nick) Clements, (born October 5, 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA), is a theoretical linguist at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.), Paris, France. He was educated in New Haven, Paris and London, and received his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1973, defending a thesis on the Ewe language based on a year of field work in Ghana. He was a visiting scientist at M.I.T. (1973-1975), and held appointments as professor at Harvard (1975-1982) and Cornell (1982-1991) before moving to Paris in 1992, where he lives with his wife and their two children.

Nick Clements' main research is in phonology with a special focus on African languages. He is best known for his research in syllable theory, tone and feature theory which have contributed to the modern theory of sound patterning in spoken language. His current work is concerned with the principles underlying speech sound inventories across languages.

[edit] Books

• Clements, G. N. & S. J. Keyser, 1983. CV Phonology: a Generative Theory of the Syllable (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 9), MIT Press, Cambridge, Ma.
• Halle, Morris & G. N. Clements, 1983. Problem Book in Phonology. Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press and Bradford Books.
• Clements, G. N. & J. Goldsmith, eds., 1984. Autosegmental Studies in Bantu Tone. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

[edit] Other selected publications

• Clements, G. N., 1985. "The Geometry of Phonological Features," Phonology Yearbook 2, 225-252
• Clements, G. N., 1990. "The Role of the Sonority Cycle in Core Syllabification." In John Kingston & M. Beckman, eds., Papers in Laboratory Phonology I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 283-333
• Clements, G. N. & Elizabeth Hume, 1995. "The Internal Organization of Speech Sounds" In John Goldsmith, ed., Handbook of Phonological Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 245-306
• Clements, G. N., 2003. "Feature Economy in Sound Systems", Phonology 20.3, pp. 287-333
• Clements, G. N. & Annie Rialland, 2008. "Africa as a phonological area". In Bernd Heine & Derek Nurse, eds, A Linguistic Geography of Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 36-85.

[edit] External links

• Nick Clements's personal webpage