English Phonetics and Phonology: An Introduction (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: English phonetics and phonology: An introduction by Philip Carr Marc Picard English phonetics and phonology: An introduction. By Philip Carr. Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. Pp. xviii, 169. Paper $24.95. The aim of this book, as stated by the author, is very simply ‘to introduce some of the bare essentials of English phonetics and phonology in a manner that is as theory-neutral as possible’ (x). It is designed specifically for students who have no previous knowledge of the subject and who, in all probability, will not pursue further studies in this area. The text is divided into eleven chapters followed by an ‘Appendix’ which provides brief outlines of various accents such as General Australian and Standard Scottish as well as those of New York City, London, and Tyneside. The book closes with a list of suggested further readings and a subject index. The first four chapters ‘contain only the most elementary introduction to articulatory phonetics’ (xi), the whole subject being covered in less than 35 pages. The initial chapters deal with consonants, with voicing along with place and manner of articulation being presented in Ch. 1 and various other features (laterals, taps and trills, nasals, etc.) appearing in Ch. 2. The next two chapters focus on vowels, specifically on those which are characteristic of Received Pronunciation and General American. Short vowels are outlined in Ch. 3 and long vowels and diphthongs in Ch. 4. Carr begins his introduction to phonology in Ch. 5. After making the point that ‘[t]he discipline of [End Page 603] phonology . . . differs from that of phonetics, since it is the study, not of speech sounds per se, but of mental abilities and largely unconscious mental states’ (37), he identifies and defines such basic concepts as phonemes and allophones, complementary distribution, and minimal pairs. Having explained and exemplified the workings of the phonemic principle, he devotes the next chapter to the vowel and consonant phonemes of English. The longest chapter in the book is the one entitled ‘English syllable structure’. Here C first describes the constituents of the syllable and then goes on to cover various related topics such as the sonority hierarchy, maximal onsets, syllable weight, and phonotactics. The next three chapters deal with English prosody—stress in Ch. 8, rhythm in Ch. 9, and intonation in Ch. 10—while in the last chapter, C considers some general aspects of accent variation. By his own admission, they all ‘contain a very strippeddown, minimal, account of those subjects’ (xi). Needless to say, this introductory text on English phonetics and phonology has stripped these topics to their bare bones. There is nothing here on acoustic phonetics, and C has also ‘excluded feature geometry, the mora, underspecification and a great many other theoretical/descriptive notions, in an attempt to pare the subject down to a bare minimum of these’ (xi). One has to wonder how much of a market there could possibly be for such a product though the author and publisher have obviously reckoned it a potentially viable commodity. Marc Picard Concordia University Copyright © 2001 Linguistic Society of America