Reviewed by: Tone by Moira Yip Charles W. Kisseberth Tone. By Moira Yip. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 376. ISBN 0521774451. $28.45. In this book, the author seems to have two goals (as indicated in the preface). On the one hand, she intends that the book serve as an appropriate textbook on tone for a linguistics student (advanced undergraduate or graduate) who has had prior exposure to a year-long course in phonology but no necessary exposure to either tone or optimality theory. On the other hand, she would like the book to serve as a kind of reference book on tone. In trying to achieve these two (possibly incompatible) goals, Yip organizes the book into ten chapters: 1. Introduction; 2. Contrastive tone; 3. Tonal features; 4. The autosegmental nature of tone, and its analysis in optimality theory; 5. Tone in morphology and in syntax; 6. African languages; 7. Asian and Pacific languages; 8. The Americas; 9. Tone, stress, accent, and intonation; and 10. Perception and acquisition of tone. Let me begin by saying that there is much to admire about this book. It provides clear and extremely useful summaries of theoretical matters (e.g. the feature system pertinent to tone (Ch. 3) and the treatment of downstep (see Ch. 6)), as well as excellent surveys of tonal phenomena and their analysis in a variety of language families (Chs. 6–8) and of the perception and acquisition of tone (Ch. 10). As such, the book goes a long way toward succeeding in terms of Y’s second goal. There may be an occasional factual lapse (more than once Y refers to the fact that standard (Seoul) Korean is nontonal, thereby implying that Korean as a whole does not have robustly tonal/accentual dialects, but such dialects certainly do exist and have been described in some detail), but the book provides an extremely informative survey of the data concerning tonal systems and is packed with very useful discussion and detailed references to relevant literature. I do, however, find it a bit perplexing that discussion of Japanese was omitted. Japanese dialects have a wide array of pitch systems that range from the ‘accentual’ end of the spectrum to the more ‘tonal’ end. In any case, Y acknowledges that there is a continuum involved, and the theoretical analysis of so-called accentual systems like Tokyo Japanese does not necessarily differ in any significant manner from the analysis of many languages regarded as tonal. Given the goals that Y sets out to achieve, it is not clear why the literature on Japanese accent/tone should be set aside (it cannot, I think, be argued that the Japanese data is in some sense so much better known or understood than the Chinese or African data as to warrant its exclusion). Although the book merits high marks as a reference volume for tonal matters, it does not succeed, in my opinion, as a textbook for the linguistics student. Let me immediately acknowledge (as a once-upon-a-time cowriter of a phonology textbook) that I have a firm belief that one teaches the student how to do phonology (tonology) and one does not teach a student about phonology (tonology). Since Y in her preface refers to ‘students of linguistics who want to learn more about tone’, I am not sure whether she would share my view about textbooks. For that reason, I do not focus my attention on what sort of an approach is needed to teach students to actually do tonal analysis. Needless to say, it would involve considerable emphasis on how one moves from the pitch data to the tonal analysis and extensive exercises in building the tonal analysis of sometimes quite complex systems of tonal alternations. However, even if the goal is to teach the student about tone, it seems to me that the student will not find this book very tractable. Surely, the student requires some orderly presentation of material so that s/he can move from one reasonably well-understood point to the next more difficult point. The book’s assumptions and organization do not permit this. For example, various feature theories are discussed in Ch. 3 where the...
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Aug 31, 2011
Yo-Sep Park + 3
Open Access
