The monograph contains two case studies dealing with the phonetics and phonology of affricates and laryngeals from a survey of 281 languages. The empirical findings go counter to a number of assumptions in the literature, e.g.: (1) affricates are exclusively stops from the perspective of phonology; (2) laryngeals are properties of the prosodic domains onset, nucleus, and coda; (3) phonetic strategies (affrication, laryngeal phasing) serve to make phonological specifications acoustically more salient. Theoretical discussions include questions of phonological representation (featural contours, prosodic licensing etc.) and the phonology-phonetics interface.