The dynamical properties of solids have recently attracted renewed interest in connection with the increasing understanding of phase transitions and re­ lated phenomena. In particular, soft modes or, more generally, phonon 'anom­ alies' seem to play an important role in structural and electronic phase tran­ sitions, such as ferroelectric or superconducting transitions. The understanding of the mechanisms responsible for the occurrence of unusually low frequencies in phonon spectra requires a detailed analysis of the microscopic forces governing the lattice vibrations. Of particular importance is the influence of the electron­ lattice interaction in the adiabatic approximation which in many cases is the origin of peculiarities in the phonon self-energy. In this work the vibrational spectra of pure non-metals and of those con­ taining point defects are investigated. ' In these materials the interrelation between the pseudo-harmonic forces (determining the phonon dispersion relations) and the non-linear anharmonic and electron-phonon forces (as they act in infrared and Raman spectra) is most obvious and can be quantitatively analysed in terms of appropriate models. The main task is to arrive at a physically correct treatment of electronic degrees of freedom, as for example in an electronic 'shell' model, which leads to the description of phonon spectra in terms of long-range polarizabilities and short-range deformabilities. The purpose of our review is to stimulate further investigations which, we hope, will result in explicit relations between the parameters of the semi-microscopic models and the matrix elements from the electronic band structure.