Autosegmental phonology

Autosegmental phonology is a modification of generative phonology introduced by John Goldsmith in his PhD thesis in 1976. He introduced the notion of parallel tiers of segments and called this autosegments&mdash;a name which is a bit misleading. As an application example he presented a detailed phonological analysis of the Igbo language spoken in Nigeria.

This was the foundation for further developments in phonology such as Nonconcatenative morphology.