Review of Monroy-Casas, Rafael & Arboleda-Guirao, Inmaculada. 2014. Readings in English Phonetics and Phonology. Valencia: Universitat de València. 409 pages. ISBN: 978– 84–370–9455–7

Abstract

Review of Monroy-Casas, Rafael & Arboleda-Guirao, Inmaculada. 2014. Readings in English Phonetics and Phonology. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia. 409 pages. ISBN: 978- 84-370-9455-7.Aimed at more advanced students, the book intends to bridge the gap between basic content and the wide world of research. The book's goal is to facilitate moving on from the dogmatic views formed at undergraduate level. It does so by offering a series of specially commissioned readings on aspects of English phonetics and phonology, with each chapter combining theoretical input with praxis. This is executed by a survey of a given topic, highlighting current debates and followed by an empirical study, which serves to illustrate how research within a subfield can be carried out. The volume contains fourteen chapters organised into three parts: Part I: English segmental phonetics and phonology, consisting of four chapters; Part II: Suprasegmental aspects of English, comprising seven chapters; and finally Part III: New developments in English, with three chapters.An interesting aspect of the volume's first part is its focus on consonants of a spoken variety. As previously pointed out by the editors of Urban Voices (Foulkes & Docherty, 1999), the focus in variationist literature had been chiefly on vowels, thus leading to the myth that vowels have more variability than other aspects of speech. Part I opens with Rodriguez- Romero's chapter discussing the phonological behaviour of yod in simple and complex syllable onsets; the author argues against its treatment as part of the consonant system despite the sound's phonetic properties. The chapter is written in the spirit of traditional descriptive phonemics and it is very pleasing to see Pike's vocoid and contoid distinction being introduced. The other chapters in this section also deal with consonants; for example, Arboleda-Guirao's is a descriptive study of syllabic consonants and schwa in the speech of the BBC newsreaders. The author discusses how a sample from a contemporary speech corpus fits in with four pedagogically-oriented descriptive rules governing the occurrence of schwa and syllabic consonants in Southern British English. Romero and Riera's chapter 4 revisits the phonetic and phonological voicing of plosives, emphasising the spatiotemporal aspect of the phenomenon and its relationship with stress, illustrated by copious examples from English. Worth noting is Barreiro-Bilbao's paper on fricatives, which uses the traditional articulatory description as an introduction to the complexity of acoustic cues and their relationship with inter-speaker variation. This is a welcome perspective, helpful in understanding the articulation-acoustics relationship and showing the current state of research on the topic.Part II offers a comprehensive coverage of English suprasegmentals. The section begins with Duchet's classification of lexical stress rules and a brief historical overview, followed by Mompean's chapter on stress shift. Through an acoustic and auditory study of -teen numbers based on a 32-hour audio corpus from the BBC World service, Mompean aims to shed light on the variation in the use of stress shiftin English. It is emphasised that stress shiftis not categorical but variable in both normal and aphasic populations, and potential conditioning variables (speaking rate, stylistic variables and word frequency) are identified. This study simultaneously introduces readers to the wealth of phonetic realisations while warning them that wider patterns may be obscured by the paucity of production data about the occurrence or frequency of variation. Consequently, the existing rules should not be taken as set in stone.Fuchs's chapter 7 is a clear introduction to rhythm types, taking the reader step by step through the topic. Its value lies in a neat demonstration on how to construct experimental methodology, taking as an example a sentence from the DyViS corpus and applying Pairwise Variability method to measure the durational differences between syllables in Southern British English speech. …