This volume is built up of three sections, covering three interfaces with phonology: phonetics, morphosyntax, and the lexicon. Some chapters could be accessible to students of linguistics at undergraduate level, but the book as a whole is more suited to researchers working in one of the above areas or a related field.
Section 1 contains six chapters focusing on the phonology–phonetics interface. In the first, by Bartłomiej Czaplicki, is a nod to Sapir: ‘Linguistic units should be psychologically real, and must therefore be confirmed by linguistic behaviour’ (p. 25). Using evidence from hypocoristics and diminuitives in Polish, he argues that phonetic information informs phonological representations. The chapter is well-structured and has a good background section which makes it accessible to students but jumps quickly to a more difficult level when it comes to the conclusions.
The second chapter, by Guillaume Enguehard, deals with melodic realisations of stress and contains illuminating examples from a number of languages but requires some knowledge of Government Phonology. I am left wondering what actually governs the position of the suggested extra skeletal CV, and would have welcomed some further discussion on this issue. The author claims that the insertion of a CV structure, positioned in a specific place triggers a specific realisation, and that the ‘diverse identifications’ of the CV position ‘are derived effects at the interface between phonology and phonetics’ (p. 56). Albeit not mutually exclusive, the first claim indicates to me an argument for phonological knowledge causing the realisation, the second that there is interaction between phonetics and phonology.
Haike Jacobs, Joop Kerkhoff & Alexander Greefhorst, the authors of Chapter 3, look at consonant durations in Dutch ‘ambisyllabic’ intervocalic contexts, using phonetic methodology in three experiments, two on production, and one on perception. The experiments investigate duration of identical consonants across word boundaries in Dutch from different points of view. The results show that single and double plosive or glide productions are not perceptually different, whereas single and double fricatives and liquids are, and the article concludes with a preference for a phonological explanation rather than an explanation which, as the authors argue, assumes a purely phonetic implementation. To my mind, the two explanations of the data need not be in such a dichotomous relationship; surely phonetic implementation (in production and perception) can be (simultaneously) guiding and interacting with the phonological or phonotactic system employed by or available to the speaker?
Chapter 4, by Mayuki Matsui, investigates voicing behaviour in Russian obstruents. Both duration of voicing and duration of constriction are measured, and the results show that fricatives are more likely than other obstruents to be partially devoiced. A minor point which seems odd to me is the description of discarded tokens as ‘mispronounced nonsense words’ (p. 88). Is using nonsense words not a strength in that they have no ‘correct’ pronunciation, and that, consequently, they cannot be mispronounced? Perhaps it would be better put as ‘some token productions were removed due to not following the expected pronunciation patterns’? The author shows understanding of sociolinguistic variation by pointing out that variationist studies would be the next step in the research, but that the data herein (drawn from eight speakers) is too limited for such an analysis. Durational symmetry is found among the different plosives and fricatives, in that the underlying voicing contrast is manifested in the duration of voicing relative to the duration of constriction. The voiced fricatives are, however, partially devoiced more often than the voiced plosives. The chapter concludes that this symmetry is a phonological phenomenon, while the asymmetry in voicing behaviour between the two is best explained phonetically.
The introduction to Geoffrey Schwartz’ Chapter 5 gives a great overview of the VOT contrast as well as the theoretical assumptions regarding the onset prominence representational environment employed in the paper, and could thus be suited to students. Part three of the chapter raises the bar quite a bit, however, and the reasoning becomes probably too complicated for (at least undergraduate) students to follow. The paper makes a case for using the Onset Prominence framework when studying VOT, as it allows for a combined approach using both phonetic data and phonological frameworks. The basis for testing the hypotheses phonetically is a phonological approach, thus clearly placing the paper within the phonetics–phonology interface theoretically.
In Chapter 6, Péter Szigetvári argues that segments which are known in phonetics as diphthongs and long vowels are, in fact, a VC structure. To support this point, a number of assumptions are made and the transcription of diphthongal sequences Is simplified as vowel + glide. The main argument for this simplification is that the IPA transcriptions ‘look[s] quite alien’ (p. 124; clearly a matter of opinion) and will not help end users, e.g. language learners. This argument is puzzling because the chapter is seemingly aimed at phonologists/phoneticians. Szigetvári further argues that phonological analysis does not need the level of detail IPA transcriptions provide and instead uses the simplified version in the analyses. Subsequent arguments include considerations of why diphthongs should not be treated differently from consonant clusters (because components of both occur in minimal pairs; the author compares, for example, the pairing of the price and mouth diphthongs which contain the same onset vowel, as well as l-vocalisation in words like bill /iw/, which he pairs with the fleece vowel (p. 131)). Here, the author touches on the categorical nature of the IPA and how it separates vowels and consonants. Indeed, this would be a direction for the author to develop further argumentation. The assumption that there is one standard spoken British English is, however, somewhat naive, and the accents on which the author bases his case are unspecified.
The volume’s second section, on the phonology–morphosyntax interface, begins with Chapter 7, by Jieun Bark. This chapter investigates the tensing of obstruents in Korean using an extension of Government Phonology (GP2.0, p. 156), and argues for an empty CV structure at the left edge of a word (#C is cvC) and an empty V at the end of words ending in consonants (C# is Cv). This case is made by showing that tensing is triggered by access to word boundaries, making the extra structure necessary as it hosts the first part of the tense consonant; the tensing is expressed by the melodic command which requires an adjunction structure. At the right edge, the presence of the V follows from the left-edge argument, as Korean coronals are neutralised in coda and there is no need for a melodic command. Bark argues that previous studies using /t/-insertion have ‘discarded phonological status of word boundaries and morphosyntactic categories’ (p. 170) and her analysis provides a rather satisfactory explanation of the tensing phenomena as far as is possible without presenting any phonetic data.
Karolina Broś’ Chapter 8 has a methodical and pedagogical approach and disposition. This chapter could be accessible to students as well as being useful to more advanced readers. The empirical data connects to the phonological and morphosyntactic analyses in a clear and logical way, making the chapter easy to follow. Broś uses stratal Optimality Theory to consider spirantisation and voicing within the same model, and finds that while this is not ideal, it is possible if a local constraint conjunction is applied, i.e. banning multiple feature changes. The paper shows an awareness of sociolinguistic variation and discusses geographic differences to explain some assumptions.
In Chapter 9, Kamil Kaźmierski examines the behaviour of intervocalic /w/ in Polish. I would have been interested to see the data discussed further in connection with a theoretical standpoint (which the author hints at in the section on directions for further research). The author finds that the reduction of invervocalic /w/ (such as in miałem ‘I had-masc’ [mʲjawɛm] or [mʲjaɛm]) is not restricted to one geographic area, gender or social group, indicating that there is no change in progress. The chapter is thorough and many bases are covered and discussed – internal and external factors such as speaker variability (gender and geographical distribution), parts of speech and phonetic context – which makes for a great experimental basis for a theoretical discussion.
Raquel Santana Santos combines prosodic theory and methodology with syntactic categories in studying stress-class resolution patterns in Chapter 10. One of the goals of the study is to ‘bring experimental data on stress shift for comparison’, as the ‘data available so far only involve grammaticality judgements’ (p. 224). The data consists of sentences read by 32 speakers, and the durations of the relevant syllables are measured to find how these speakers resolve stress clashes caused by adjacent stressed syllables. The paper makes a clear connection between the experimental results and the theoretical discussion, but is not the easiest to follow for someone who is not well versed in syntactic theory.
Section 3, devoted to phonology and the lexicon, contains three chapters, and commences with Chapter 11 by Krzysztof Jaskuła on Hawaiian loanwords. The discussion would have benefitted from empirical data. It seems to be collating previous studies and applying a Government Phonology + Complexity scales and licensing methodology, but, for example, a perception study would lend support to the conclusions on the benefits of the analysis based on licensing, nuclear strength and cluster variation with regard to loanword adaptation patterns and choices speakers make with regard to these.
In Chapter 12, Marek Radomski & Kateryna Sydorenko compare the results of two experiments in which speakers of British English were asked to reproduce words in a language which was not known to them. One of the experiments used Polish target words and one used Ukrainian, and the chapter concludes that, for native speakers of English, vowel epenthesis is a more common strategy than consonant elision for simplifying unfamiliar consonant cluster productions, such as /rʒ/ being simplified to /ʒ/. A phonological analysis based on the English phoneme inventory applied to the deletion of the velar fricative [x] in sequences such as [xf] (no examples of words are given in the chapter) fails to explain this behaviour, leading the authors to conclude that the consonant deletion takes place in the perception phase and is dependent on the consonantal context. Thus, the authors opt for a phonetic explanation. An interesting aspect of this study is that the term loanword appears in the context of word repetition in an unfamiliar language, and has prompted me to think about when a loanword (i) becomes a loanword, and (ii) stops being a loanword and becomes integrated into a language.
Chapter 13, by Jolanta Szpyra-Kozłowska & Marek Radomski, follows nicely from the preceding one, as it (among other things) discusses the role that the time of introduction plays in the adaptation of a loanword into the language. There is some tendency for /æ/ in older loanwords from English into Polish, as well as those loanwords borrowed from British English to be produced with [ɛ], and for newer loans, and those borrowed from American English to be produced as [a] in Polish. This tendency ties in nicely with the experimental results of the study: British English speakers are perceived as producing [ɛ] and General American speakers as producing [a]. This is to some extent also supported by the formant frequencies presented in the paper. The authors go on to compare two processes of loanword introduction, nativisation-through-production (where proficient bilinguals introduce the loans) and nativisation-through-perception (where the loan is introduced by monolinguals), framing them as a phonological vs. a phonetic approach, respectively, and putting them in strict dichotomy. It is, nonetheless, concluded that both approaches offer a too simplistic explanation, making me question why they could not be combined and developed in this paper further.
The last sentence of the last article reads: ‘more attention should be given to the often ignored issue of the source accent(s)’ (p. 293). This is one of the points which have occurred to me when reading (quite a few of the papers in) this book: more attention could have been given to describing or acknowledging accents and the sociolinguistics of these issues, where appropriate. Variation is typically glossed over and ignored. Of course, variation is not the focus of this book, but its inclusion could have added value and perhaps offered explanations in places where the conclusions were not as expected. The book would also have benefitted from some thorough proofreading, as there appear to be some printing errors and a few papers appear to be in need of more language support. The sections are heterogeneous in terms of both length and chapter numbers, and unfortunately the chapters are also somewhat uneven in quality. I would have very much enjoyed reading a summarising final chapter by the editors, tying together the diverse papers of the volume. However, I believe this book will be of especial use to scholars who may not come into contact with phonology in their normal course of study, as it offers a wide perspective and ideas for combining varied fields and angles of research.
