The ambition of this paper is to provide a phonological account of an
intricate pattern of lenition and gemination in Campidanese Sardinian.
The data show two things: that a model of phonology needs some way of
showing strength and weakness as positional effects, and that neither
can be reliably understood in phonetic terms. In this analysis, the
discovery procedure does not depend on raw phonetic facts, but rather
on a rich model of abstract phonological representations. These
representations are of two kinds: melodic and prosodic—they allow for a
substance-free phonological analysis of lenition and fortition in
Campidanese that is not confronted by the difficulties inherent in
surface-oriented approaches.