Discovering Phonetics and Phonology by Lynne Cahill is an accessible and highly engaging resource for introductory courses in phonetics and phonology. The book covers a variety of topics from articulatory phonetics, the foundational concepts from acoustic phonetics and phonology, and the key terms from morphology that are important for understanding morphophonological processes. There are 14 content chapters that are grouped into six parts. Part I, ‘What is phonetics and why do I need it?’, focuses on the relationship between spelling and pronunciation (Chapter 1) as well as the reasons for studying phonetics and the main challenges associated with phonetic analysis (Chapter 2). Part II, ‘How to describe and classify sounds’, discusses articulatory and acoustic aspects of consonants (Chapter 3) and vowels (Chapter 4). Part III, ‘Putting sounds together’, looks at syllables (Chapter 5) and morphemes (Chapter 6). Part IV, ‘Rhythm and tune’, covers suprasegmental concepts, including lexical and phrasal stress (Chapter 7), tone and intonation (Chapter 8), and the distinction between phonetic duration and phonological length (Chapter 9). Part V, ‘Phonology’, examines phonological features and sound classes (Chapter 10), the notion of the phoneme and phonemic analysis (Chapter 11), and how phonemic distinctions are affected by neutralization, allomorphy, and the level of abstractness (Chapter 12). Part VI, ‘Phonological theory’, introduces the main types of phonological processes (Chapter 13) and provides a brief overview of the major phonological frameworks, including the Neogrammarian approach and other theories that pre-date the Sound Patterns of English (SPE; Chomsky & Halle Reference Chomsky and Halle1968), the SPE itself, Autosegmental Phonology, and Optimality Theory (Chapter 14).
According to the Preface for teachers (pp. xiii–xiv), the book’s target audience is undergraduate students without prior background in linguistics and it is written with the goal of making the ‘first exposure to phonetics (and a bit of phonology) a bit less threatening than traditional approaches’ (p. xiii). The author focuses primarily on the English language, which makes the book especially easy to understand for those students who are not very familiar with languages other than English. The author also emphasizes the correspondences between spelling and pronunciation in English, so that students can use their existing knowledge of orthography to better understand phonetic and phonological concepts and processes. Discussion on the relationship between sound and spelling in English starts on the very first page of Chapter 1 (p. 3), which helps students understand the mapping between sounds and graphemes and the different types of writing systems, and simultaneously introduces the reader to the idea that both writing and pronunciation can be highly variable. This prepares students for the more advanced phonological concepts presented in later chapters, such as the notions of phoneme and allophone in Chapter 11 (pp. 162–175). In Chapter 5, a section on syllables and orthography (pp. 91–93) helps students better understand not only syllabic writing systems but also the concepts of ambisyllabicity and sonority. In Chapter 11, discussion of the differences between upper- and lower-case graphemes (pp. 162–163) serves as an introduction to the concept of the phoneme.
Another major strength of the book is in how it engages students. The author talks directly to the reader and each chapter contains ‘quick quizzes’ that start an initial conversation about the concepts introduced in the chapter. Quick quiz questions are always simple yet thought-provoking, with detailed answers given in the chapter itself. Chapter 1, for example, discusses the main types of writing systems and the historical reasons for the lack of one-to-one mapping between sounds and graphemes in English. Prior to introducing students to the relevant concepts and facts, the reader is asked to think about the irregular nature of English orthography (p. 3) and to examine Latin-based versus non-Latin-based written forms (p. 7). Similarly, discussions of suprasegmental elements and the need for phonetic transcription are preceded by quick quiz questions that deal with shifting stress (p. 12), counting syllables and locating syllable boundaries (p. 13), and looking up transcriptions in a dictionary (p. 14). In Chapter 2, students are asked to pay attention to the variability in the pronunciation of words and sentences (pp. 18, 22) before they are introduced to the distinction between phonetic and phonological transcription. In Chapter 3, quick quiz questions help students better understand the organization of the IPA chart (p. 49). In Chapters 5 and 6, students practice syllabification (p. 78) and division of words into morphemes (p. 95) before encountering the concept of sonority and learning about syllable structure and phonotactics, syllable weight, ambisyllabicity, morpheme types, and morphophonological alternations. Chapters 7–9 examine stress, tone, intonation, and length. The quick quiz questions in these chapters encourage students to think about syllable prominence within a word (p. 107), how voice changes depending on the pragmatic situation (pp. 122, 123), and how speech sounds vary in duration (p. 132). In Chapters 10–13, students are asked to consider the similarities and differences between sounds or graphemes (pp. 144, 157), the type of changes that affect meanings (p. 162), and the way sounds change when occurring next to other sounds or in connected speech (pp. 177, 191). This prepares the reader for the discussion of distinctive features, natural classes, phonemes, and phonological processes.
While the main focus of the book is on English and most of the examples and exercises deal with English speech sounds, in later chapters the author does incorporate examples and exercises based on Mandarin (p. 126), Gikuyu (p. 126), Italian (p. 176), Korean (p. 176), Spanish (p. 176), Setswana (p. 176), Norwegian (p. 186), German (p. 188), Turkish (p. 194), Kikuria (p. 196), Japanese (p. 200), and other languages. Throughout the book, the author also provides previews of topics covered in upcoming chapters, reminds the reader about previously covered terms, and shows how the concepts in the current chapter relate to other areas of linguistics. The content of Chapter 2, for example, is linked to the fields of sociophonetics (p. 26), language acquisition (p. 29), discourse analysis (p. 32), speech pathology (p. 33), and forensic linguistics (pp. 33–34). Chapter 3 includes a preview of allophonic variation affecting English nasals (p. 44) that the author analyzes in detail in Chapter 12 (pp. 180–184). There are also examples from notable phonetic studies, such as Labov’s department store study (pp. 20–21) and phonetic analysis of Mick Jagger’s interviews (pp. 27–28). This makes it easier for students to understand phonetic concepts and also demonstrates some of the practical applications of phonetic research.
At the end of each chapter, the author includes a list of suggested readings, followed by a set of exercises (with the exception of Chapter 14). Detailed answers to the exercises are given at the back of the book (pp. 218–237), so the exercises can be used for either in-class work or independent study. For more advanced discussion, several chapters contain ‘brief asides’ with additional information on the topic of the chapter. In Chapter 1, brief asides present the main milestones in the development of the English orthography, including the effects of the Norman conquest and the legacy of Samuel Johnson’s work (p. 6), and the steps involved in the transition from ideographic to alphabetic systems (p. 11). In Chapter 4, the supplementary information includes notes of the vowel length in Scottish English (p. 61) and the Great Vowel Shift (p. 64). In Chapter 5, students learn about morae (p. 87) and the phonotactic restrictions on the velar nasal in English (p. 90). Chapter 6 discusses the ‘cranberry morph’ (p. 96) and the formation of compounds (p. 101). Chapters 8 and 9 examine some of the ways in which suprasegmental information can be reflected in writing. This includes capitalization, the choice of font and the use of emojis (p. 129) as well as repetition of graphemes (p. 137). In Chapters 10 through 13, brief asides address a wide variety of topics, including the difference between dental and alveolar plosives (p. 147), the orthography of Latin (p. 151), some of the diachronic changes in the Germanic languages (p. 158), the difference between ‘emic’ versus ‘etic’ units (p. 167), the vowel harmony in Old English (p. 194), and /h/-deletion in contemporary English (p. 202).
The content of the appendices can also be used for more advanced class activities or homework assignments. Appendix A (pp. 238–240) provides a general description of the SAMPA transcription system and side-by-side comparison tables for IPA and SAMPA. Appendix B (pp. 241–246) includes an easy-to-follow Praat tutorial with step-by-step instructions on creating sound objects, viewing waveforms and spectrograms, examining pitch tracks and formants, normalizing formant values, and creating a graph showing the position of vowels within the acoustic vowel space using the first formant (F1) and second formant (F2) measurements (a F1xF2 chart). Appendix C (p. 247) describes two ideas for classroom activities (an IPA bingo and an IPA hangman) that can be easily incorporated into classwork.
While the book has many strengths, there are several limitations that need to be considered when evaluating it for adoption in the classroom. First, the author’s main emphasis is on the sound system of Standard Southern British English (SSBE) so the majority of descriptions, examples and exercises are based exclusively on SSBE. The book does mention other dialects, such as General American (GA), but transcriptions and explanations for these dialects are often simplified. For example, the table of SSBE versus GA vowels in Chapter 4 (p. 67; also, Appendix A on p. 240) does not reflect the CAUGHT–COT merger that is a well-known feature of most North American dialects (among others, Labov, Ash & Boberg Reference Labov, Ash and Boberg2006). The author also uses the IPA symbol for the voiced retroflex approximant /ɻ/ for GA (p. 67), which is only one of several possible realizations of the English rhotic (Delattre & Freeman Reference Delattre and Freeman1968) and the less common one for American English speakers, who tend to use the non-retroflex (aka ‘bunched’) tongue shape (Mielke, Baker & Archangeli Reference Mielke, Baker and Archangeli2016). In addition, the author uses the loop-tail G instead of the open-tail G, which is allowed but generally not recommended (IPA 1993, Pullum & Ladusaw Reference Pullum and Ladusaw1996), and also uses ligature for affricates, which is no longer standard (Pullum & Ladusaw Reference Pullum and Ladusaw1996, IPA 1999).
Another potentially important consideration is that the sections on phonetics focus primarily on the articulation of speech sounds. For acoustics, the book provides only a basic overview of the most important concepts. There are only two examples of spectrograms in Chapters 3 and 4 (the same utterance without and with formant tracks; pp. 54, 71) and no examples of sound waves in any of the chapters (a sample non-segmented waveform can only be found in Appendix B, p. 243). There are also no figures illustrating such concepts as frequency and intensity in Chapter 3, and there are no waveforms or spectrograms in Chapter 9 that discusses segmental duration. Furthermore, the F1xF2 space figure in Chapter 4 that illustrates the results of the Jagger study (p. 73) is difficult for students to understand without a detailed caption. Articulatory descriptions in Chapters 3 and 4 are also text-heavy. Figures illustrating the position of articulators, the basic structure of the larynx and the airstream mechanisms would have made the articulatory phonetic concepts easier to understand.
As the book covers both phonetics and phonology, it is also important to keep in mind that the author prioritizes phonetics and that many phonological concepts are simplified. For example, the list of distinctive features for consonants in Chapter 10 (p. 159) includes such simplified manner features as [plosive] and [fricative] (instead of [continuant]) as well as place features such as [dental], [palatal], and [velar] (instead of using combinations of [coronal], [anterior], and [distributed]; [high], [back], and [low]). Such features can be seen in other textbooks with a primary focus on phonetics (e.g. Roach Reference Roach2009) but not in the more traditional systems and textbooks that focus on phonology (e.g. Chomsky & Halle Reference Chomsky and Halle1968, Hayes Reference Hayes2009, Odden Reference Odden2013). There is also no clear list of vowel features in Chapter 10, only a general description of which vowel parameters are potentially relevant for English (p. 160). For phonological rules, there are six examples total in the book. This includes a generic rule that illustrates the basic rule format (p. 172), two rules written using segmental notation (for ‘clear l’ and ‘dark l’; p. 173), two rules written using distinctive features (for aspiration; p. 173), and one rule that combines segmental notation and distinctive features (for vowel reduction; p. 187). Certain phonological concepts are also not accompanied with examples at all. For example, in the section on theoretical frameworks in Chapter 14, there are no examples of feature-geometric representations or OT tableaux.
Finally, while the book does include an index with key words and phrases (pp. 250–254), there is no glossary and no companion website. The glossary would have provided students with an easy to use working vocabulary of the most important terms (e.g. see Odden Reference Odden2013: 323–327), and the companion website with downloadable sound files would have been an especially helpful resource for the sections on consonant and vowel acoustics in Chapters 3 and 4, the section on durational differences in Chapter 9, and the Praat tutorial in Appendix B (e.g. see the companion website to Hayes Reference Hayes2009).
In summary, Discovering Phonetics and Phonology is an easy to follow textbook for introductory undergraduate courses with a primary focus on English phonetics. The book is most appropriate for students with limited previous knowledge of other languages or linguistics. It is best suited for linguistics programs that include separate, more advanced coursework in phonology and for institutions and locales where British English is spoken or plays a prominent role.
