Nancy C. Kula, Bert Botma and Kuniya Nasukawa (eds.) (2011). Continuum companion to phonology. (Continuum Companions.) London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Pp. xv+524 (original) (raw)
Goldsmith's (1995) Handbook of phonological theory provided an influential overview of the field in the mid-90s, earning a well-deserved place on the shelf of practising phonologists. The volume under review is not the first to attempt to update this classic work. Two other recent handbooks of comparable length and scope are the second edition of Goldsmith (Goldsmith et al. 2011), and de Lacy's (2007) well-received Cambridge handbook of phonology. Besides evaluating how well the current work meets the general expectations that readers have for a handbook, this review must necessarily also address the inevitable questions : why yet another handbook of phonology just now ? ; how does this volume distinguish itself from its competitors ? ; does this work fill a gap that is not met by the other handbooks ? The names of the editors and authors provide the first clue to what makes this volume distinctive. Almost all contributors work and/or received their PhDs in Europe, whereas North American phonologists dominate the other handbooks. The European perspective is felt in several of the core chapters in the second and longest part of the volume, ' Research issues ', which discuss certain approaches-such as Element Theory, Government Phonology and CV theory-that tend to be less well known in North America. The chapter by Botma, Kula & Nasukawa on ' Features' has a comprehensive discussion of the phonetic motivation for different feature theories in early generative phonology, followed by a clear introduction to Element Theory. One of the distinctive properties of Element Theory is that the same feature can have different phonetic realisations, depending on the featural configuration (in particular, which other feature is the head of the configuration). The advantages of representing voicing and nasality with a single feature are exemplified with a detailed analysis of alternations involving nasal prefixes in Zoque. Péter Szigetvári's chapter on ' Syllables ' follows a critical historical survey of motivations for syllable structure with an exceptionally clear introduction to CV theory, a theory which essentially dispenses with the syllable as a constituent. As someone who was not trained in this approach, I read the chapter with scepticism. However, by the end of it I felt I had an appreciative understanding of how strict CV licensing can account for classic problems like restrictions on consonant and vowel clusters which are usually considered motivations for syllable structure. Both this chapter and the one on features will be read with interest by phonologists wishing to understand the highlighted theories better. They will surely be recommended to students as useful introductory chapters by phonologists working in the theories presented. However, as the focus in these chapters is on the particular theories under discussion, they are not intended to provide a useful guide to current research and issues in other frameworks.
Related papers
Recent developments in phonological theory
Lingua, 1979
H.'s book (a revised and expanded version of her UCLA dissertation (IULC 1973)) presents and elaborates a phonological theory which has been developed mainly by Vennemann in a number of articles published since 1972. The book is divided into two parts. The first part (Concreteness in Morphophonology) deals with "the formal constraints on the theory", i.e. it concentrates on the abstractness and actual form of underlying reprefientations (henceforth UR's), rule types, cyclic application, rule order and phonological change. It includes several illustrations from Spanish. Part two (Natural Phonological Structure) deals with "substantive phonological issues" and contains a discussion of the distinction between morpheme structure rules vs. phonetic-phonological rules (the so-called duplication problem) and especially of the role and formal treatment of the syllable.
Review of Matthew Gordon's Phonological Typology (OUP, 2016)
Folia Linguistica, 2017
In “Where’s phonology in typology?” Larry Hyman (2007) observed that phonology, a discipline with an abiding interest in typology and much to offer it, had only a slender profile in publications representing the discipline of typology itself. In the ensuing years, not much changed (Hyman 2017). The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology (Song 2010), for example, grants phonology a single chapter out of thirty, and likewise the The Cambridge handbook of linguistic typology (Aikhenvald and Dixon 2017). The result has been a deficit of extended, synthesizing work. However, with Matthew K. Gordon’s Phonological typology, published in the new series Oxford Surveys in Phonology and Phonetics, the landscape changes. Here we have a serious overview of the field with enough room for richly informative data to join critically with multiple theoretical viewpoints, supplemented with key references and tidy summaries. Moreover, Gordon delivers on Hyman’s (2007) promise that phonology can offer particular insights for the theory of typology in general, especially around the role of levels of analysis, a topic which I take up in the discussion below. Consequently, this is a book which should be read not only by all phonologists, but by theoretically minded typologists of all subfields.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.