1 Goals and organisation

The editors describe the collection as an ‘encyclopedia of case studies’ that focus on hotly debated topics in the field, with reviews that concentrate on the empirical arguments for various sides. Many of the review chapters do just this, but many do not touch on empirical arguments to any great extent. Quite a few of the review chapters would be excellent first readings on a topic, but some would be difficult for the uninitiated. The ideal home for this collection is the reference section of a university library. Its volumes are not sold individually, and they are not meant to be read cover to cover: chapters within each volume are arranged alphabetically by author, and quite a few papers could easily appear in another volume. Some aspects of the organisation are user-friendly (e.g. the table of contents appears at the beginning of each volume), but others make the Companion harder to use as a reference source. This is especially true of the paper edition – I have more to say about the paper and the electronic formats at the end of this review, after discussing its organisation and contents.

The review chapters are grouped loosely by theme: general issues/segmental phonology, prosodic phonology, phonological processes, interfaces and case studies in individual languages or language families. The editors acknowledge that they had to make some arbitrary choices about which chapters should go in which volumes. For example, the chapters on first language acquisition of phonology are scattered throughout the volumes on phonological processes and interfaces, whereas learnability is the third chapter in the volume on general issues. Anthi Revithiadou's ‘The Phonological Word’ is in the suprasegmental/prosodic volume, but readers interested in the morphology–phonology interface would want to consult its useful discussion. Likewise, David Odden's chapter on vowel length appears in the volume on segmental phonology, whereas consonant length is treated in two chapters in the prosodic phonology volume (Stuart Davis's ‘Geminates’ and Astrid Kraehenmann's ‘Initial geminates’). Vowel length is often correlated with featural distinctions, as in the English tense/lax short/long contrast [ɪ] vs. [i], and some approaches to consonant length also treat it as a featural rather than a prosodic distinction. Thus many chapters do not unambiguously belong in one or the other volume. The by-volume groupings might mislead the reader of the paper edition, though not necessarily the online edition.

Volume I, General issues and segmental phonology, is the biggest volume of the collection, and the only one in which not all of the chapters are arranged alphabetically. It kicks off with a chapter by Jennifer Cole & José Ignacio Hualde on underlying representations (URs). This is a detailed and learned overview of the history of abstract URs and the notions of the phoneme, archiphoneme and underspecification, with informative examples. Its presentation of modern alternatives to abstract URs is less detailed: storage of phonetic detail in the lexicon is presented as gaining mainstream acceptance, but Exemplar Theory and Articulatory Phonology are not explained in much depth. Likewise lacking is any in-depth discussion of whether prosodic structure needs to be part of lexical representations. Daniel Currie Hall's chapter on contrast is notable for its coverage of several very different views of contrast, from Modified Contrastive Specification to Dispersion Theory and standard optimality-theoretic treatments of allophonic distributions. Jeffrey Heinz & Jason Riggle's chapter on learnability is a fascinating review of machine learning, though I doubted whether most phonologists would understand the computer science terminology and be able to relate it to learnability of phonology. I felt that the chapter missed the opportunity to engage novice readers in a topic of increasing importance.

The volume also includes several general reviews of features and their organisation: the atoms of phonological representations, distinctive features and the organisation of features. There are also dedicated chapters for most features and natural classes: laterals, rhotics, affricates, fricatives, pharyngeals, clicks, glides, partially nasal segments, coronals, vowel height and sonorants each have their own chapters. Readers familiar with the history of the field will recognise that some of these topics were hotly debated in the 1980s and early 1990s, but less so in recent decades. For example, the representation of affricates, discussed in Yen-Hwei Lin's enjoyable chapter, did not receive a great deal of attention in the 2000s, even though the issue has never been conclusively settled. The same can be said of other debates about segmental phonology, as many contributions make clear.

The volume covers some additional topics that phonologists should be familiar with but sometimes sadly neglect. There are three excellent and informative chapters on sign language phonology, and there are also some less expected topics, such as Andrew Wedel's chapter on self-organisation in phonology. The latter is a thought-provoking survey of biological/evolutionary explanations in phonology, though it is thin on concrete phonological examples.

Volume II, Suprasegmental and prosodic phonology, is about prosody: the rhythmic and tonal properties of speech. There are several papers on tone and intonation, units of the prosodic hierarchy such as feet and syllables, and timing contrasts. Also covered are sonority and the phonology of syllabically defined positions such as the onset.

Quite a few contributions to this volume are excellent reviews. Matthew Gordon's chapter on phonetic and phonotactic evidence for stress is well written and referenced, and its summary of the current state of the field would serve as a good springboard for new research. Anna R. K. Bosch's chapter on the internal structure of syllables is notable for being not only comprehensive but also compact: in just fifteen pages, it manages to cover most of the major theoretical and experimental developments in research on the syllable. Bosch's justified scepticism comes through in the assessment of the experimental evidence for syllables. On the other hand, Michael Hammond's chapter, ‘The foot’, devotes too much space to proposals that have not withstood the test of time, which would make it a poor choice for a reading assignment in a forward-oriented phonology course. Nina Topintzi's chapter, ‘Onsets’, does a fine job of arguing that onset-sensitive stress exists, but for a discussion of other constraints on onsets, the reader should look elsewhere (e.g. Roderic F. Casali's ‘Hiatus resolution’ in Vol. III, Heather Goad's ‘The representation of sC clusters’ in Vol. II or Jongho Jun's ‘Positional effects in consonant clusters’, also in Vol. II).

More so than other volumes, Vol. II highlights the interconnectedness of phonological topics. In order to get a good sense of an area, the reader would want to consult several chapters in the Companion. Prosodic phonology is closely connected to both segmental phonology and morphology. Someone interested in learning more about tone (and more generally F0) would have to consult all five volumes of the set. The distribution of tone is sometimes restricted by the nature of the consonants and vowels that bear it, which is discussed in John Kingston's chapter on tonogenesis in Vol. IV. The autosegmental representation of tone has been fruitfully extended to other segmental features, as discussed in William R. Leben's chapter on autosegments (Vol. I). There is significant overlap between that chapter and Larry M. Hyman's ‘The representation of tone’ (Vol. II). Several contributions to Vol. V specifically discuss tone in Chinese and Bantu. Readers interested in constraints on tone should check out Charles W. Kisseberth's ‘Conspiracies’ in Vol. III, which discusses a number of tone rules that are functionally united. Downstep is covered in Vol. II, along with accentual systems and intonation – though there is a chapter on English intonation in Vol. V as well.

Volume III, Phonological processes, contains chapters about rules: metathesis, dissimilation, vowel epenthesis, nasal harmony, lenition, vowel harmony, final devoicing, compensatory lengthening and so on. There are also chapters on topics that are less obvious candidates for inclusion in a volume on ‘processes’: constraint conjunction, emergence of the unmarked, structure preservation, and markedness and faithfulness constraints. The decision to focus on processes is perhaps understandable: it is usually easy to describe mappings and the changes they introduce, but it is not always clear exactly why alternations happen, what might be triggering or blocking them, and whether they even happen for a reason. Indeed, Kisseberth's chapter on conspiracies brings this into focus, and to this day there are at least two schools of thought about phonological processes: in one view, phonology should capture rules that occur in human languages, perhaps using maximally restrictive representations; in another view, the goal of phonology should be to explain not just what happens, but why it happens, and why certain types of patterns do not occur or occur very rarely. If you take the latter stand, you may find Vol. III unsatisfying.

One of the consequences of the focus on processes is that many chapters enumerate examples of the rule in question and mention some approaches to it over the years, but they do not necessarily identify interesting questions about the phenomenon for future work. For example, Eugene Buckley's chapter on metathesis is rich in examples of the rule, and discusses its historical origins, but one would not learn from it that metathesis is a major example of the ‘too many solutions’ problem in Optimality Theory (Steriade Reference Steriade, Hume and Johnson2001), or which solutions have been proposed to this problem (see e.g. McCarthy Reference McCarthy, Baković, Ito and McCarthy2006).

Another inevitable consequence is that a few famous constraints are not covered in dedicated chapters. One noticeable omission is the Obligatory Contour Principle (Leben Reference Leben1973, McCarthy Reference McCarthy1986). It is mentioned in the dissimilation chapter, as well as chapters on tone and autosegments, but someone interested in the constraint would have to look outside of this collection for a compact overview. It may not be immediately obvious that the OCP and dissimilation are different topics, but they are. On the one hand, dissimilation can be triggered by constraints other than the OCP, as has been argued for vowel reduction (Crosswhite Reference Crosswhite1999). On the other hand, phenomena other than dissimilation rules have been attributed to the OCP: allomorph selection, antigemination, and so on. Another topic that I was surprised not to find even in the index is lexical stress, of the kind found in Russian and Greek (see e.g. Halle Reference Halle1973). Japanese accent is covered in Haruo Kubozono's contribution to Vol. V, but his chapter does not discuss any theoretical approaches to such systems. Several papers in Vol. II touch on related issues, but there is no in-depth discussion. I think the collection would have benefited from a chapter that specifically discusses the ‘too many solutions’ problem – enough work has accumulated on this problem in the past decade that it is a good candidate for a hotly debated topic, and one of considerable interest to many phonologists.

Most of the contributions to Vol. IV, Phonological interfaces, discuss the interfaces of phonology with phonetics and with morphosyntax. More than half of the chapters are about the morphology–phonology interface: paradigms, morpheme structure constraints, allomorphy, root–affix asymmetries, phonological patterns that are determined by syntactic categories, exceptionality and root-and-pattern morphology. On the phonetics side, there are chapters about speech perception, tonogenesis, and gradience and categoriality (including incomplete neutralisation). Adamantios I. Gafos & Amanda Dye's chapter on vowel harmony discusses the articulatory theory of the phenomenon at length (which is presumably why it ended up in this volume and not in Vol. III, with consonant harmony and nasal harmony). Several chapters deal with the phonological organisation of the lexicon, both from the perspective of psycholinguistics and that of linguistic theory.

Many of these chapters would work as either a starting point for novice researchers or a refresher course for more seasoned phonologists. Yoonjung Kang's chapter on loanword phonology offers a compact and informative synthesis of the controversial field. It would be an excellent review for someone interested in learning more about the area – I realised in reading it that my knowledge about the topic was lopsided. Matthew Wolf's review of exceptionality thoroughly covers both rule-based approaches and more recent approaches in OT (cophonologies and indexation) and listing/allomorphy approaches. He also touches upon the experimental investigations of the issue. Moreover, it does something that many other contributions to this collection do not do: it critiques the various approaches fairly and identifies questions about the phenomenon that remain open. This is a chapter I would come back to repeatedly to look up references. Andrew Nevins' discussion of phonologically conditioned allomorphy is another excellent review: it is organised around empirical generalisations and theoretical questions, not just one or the other. While some of the examples are a bit too brief to understand, they are sufficiently referenced for further inquiry. A few open questions are clearly defined – ideal for someone looking for new research topics.

Volume V, Phonology across languages, does not easily fit in with the rest of the collection, since it shifts focus from analytical issues to specific languages. The selection of languages is necessarily limited, and in this volume it is heavily biased toward European languages (out of 18 chapters, ten are on languages and language families spoken in Europe).

Some of the entries here are more useful to the uninitiated than others. I rather enjoyed Kenneth J. de Jong's chapter on English flapping – it cover the history of the phenomenon, studies of its articulatory and acoustic properties, and phonological approaches from a variety of perspectives. I only think about flapping when I teach introductory courses, and reading this chapter made me realise there is a lot more to the phenomenon. Other chapters are less successful, primarily because they do not discuss the languages in a way that is accessible to non-specialists. For example, a few papers do not consistently use the IPA or use another transcription system without explanation. Tobias Scheer's chapter on Slavic yers and Jerzy Rubach's ‘Slavic palatalization’ present data either in orthographies (Polish, Slovak) or in pseudo-orthographic representations. For example, Rubach gives Russian ɯoфëp [ʂafʲor] ‘driver’ as šof'or, using the traditional Slavicist apostrophe to indicate palatalisation (although he does also give an IPA representation of the palatalised consonant). S. J. Hannahs' chapter on Celtic mutations also uses the far-from-transparent orthographies of Celtic languages in several places instead of transcriptions. The chapter is still valuable for its discussion of the theoretical implications of the phenomenon, but for a clear sense of the pattern, an interested reader would have to consult additional sources.

2 Format and usability

The collection is being released in hard copy as a five-volume set, as well as an electronic edition. The hard-cover volumes are handsomely bound and typeset, the papers look good and there are very few typos.Footnote ¹ Each volume starts with a table of contents that lists all of the chapters in all five volumes; this is quite convenient, since the papers cross-reference each other by chapter number only. The references for each chapter appear at the end of the chapter rather than at the end of the volume, which is a plus. The electronic edition is in HTML – there is no e-reader (e.g. Kindle) version. In order to read papers offline, you have to either keep open tabs in your browser, save the page as HTML or save it to PDF. PDF files identical to the print edition are not available, and the table of contents does not list page numbers. Wiley-Blackwell recommends citing the papers by the URL on Blackwell Reference Online, and one can only hope that this will satisfy all editors. The table of contents cannot be viewed on the Companion's website without a subscription or in Wiley-Blackwell's online catalogue.

The online edition is searchable, although not entirely: numbered examples and tables are included as image captures from the print edition, so your search would not find anything that is not part of the HTML source code. While functional, the online edition is not beautiful, and the translation to HTML has introduced some errors. Footnotes are normally links, except for those that are embedded in examples (which are images). In-text transcribed examples have been converted to HTML rather than imported as images, so they sometimes appear with errors and confusing typos (e.g. the Dutch word [lɑmbdaː] ‘lambda’ in Geert Booij's chapter is misspelled both times as [lɑbadː] in the online edition, but not in the paper edition). The references also have some typesetting errors. Since an online edition has the virtue of being easy to correct, I hope that these errors will eventually be fixed. The editors' preface suggests that there may be a plan to expand the online edition in the future, which also makes it potentially more attractive than the paper edition.

Returning to the paper edition, I was disappointed to find that the index appears only in the final volume. Moreover, it leaves a lot to be desired. There are many entries in it that are not consolidated; it seems that each author contributed some keywords, which were included in the final index without any additional processing. For example, on the topic of vowel deletion, there are five entries that are not cross-referenced: syncope, vowel drop, vowel elision, vowel–zero alternations and vowel deletion. An experienced phonologist might know to look up all five, but a beginning student – a more likely reader of a volume like this – would not necessarily find all these entries. Likewise, several languages with alternative names are listed but not cross-referenced (Tswana/Setswana, Nootka/Nuu-chah-nulth). Since the index takes up dozens of pages, it is understandable that room had to be saved in the paper edition, but a more organised index would be both more compact and more useful. One could argue that an index is not as crucial as it once was, since there is also a web edition. This is true as long as the reader knows which terms to search for – e.g. to look up ‘vowel drop’ in addition to ‘vowel deletion’. A well-organised index is educational in itself, and the scant attention given to this part of the book makes it less useful as a research tool.

Neither edition of the collection is priced for individuals. The list price for the hardcover edition is £625/€750/$995,Footnote ² and individuals cannot subscribe to the online edition, which requires an institutional subscription. NYU's library informs me that the U.S.A. list price for institutions is $1939, though pricing is adjusted upward or downward, depending on the size of the university. The prices of Wiley-Blackwell's books have shot up exponentially in the last decade, which does not set it apart from other academic publishers; it is unfortunate, however, that they are pricing out graduate students, unaffiliated researchers and faculty without generous research accounts.

Should you recommend this collection to your library? On balance, I would say yes, and you should probably go with the online edition, which should improve in the future. Even with all of its organisational shortcomings, the Blackwell companion to phonology comes so close to being a comprehensive encyclopedia of all things phonological that any phonologist should find something of interest here.