In its blurb the book is described as an introductory textbook to English phonetics and phonology, which ‘assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, and presents the basic facts in a straightforward manner, making it the ideal text for beginners’. This is partly true, as McCully's book introduces phonological concepts by encouraging the reader to make their own recordings or analyse simple sets of data and then account for them, thus linking phonetic ‘field’ material to the abstract level. In this respect it is not dissimilar to Kelly & Local's (Reference Kelly and Local1989) Doing phonology: Observing, recording, interpreting. Through a series of short practical experiments McCully also shows that phonological analysis is far from dry and dull, which makes the textbook an excellent resource for taking the fear out of phonology. To give an example, phonotactics is introduced by an exercise which asks the reader to judge the well-formedness of nonsense words.

The book consists of eleven chapters. The introduction clearly presents basic concepts, such as accent and dialect, spoken and written language, phonetic observation and phonological generalization, thus laying the foundations for the subject. The main body of the book is divided into three themes: consonants (three chapters), syllables (three chapters) and vowels (three chapters). The final chapter, ‘Problems, theories and representations’, deals with phonological theories, such as distinctive features and Optimality Theory (OT). It analyses English data within distinctive feature theory, demonstrates how to express generalizations as generative rules and presents three case studies within OT: neutralization, onsets and intrusive /r/. A significant positive feature of the book is that each chapter begins with a summary describing its contents and stating its aims, and is followed by a set of exercises, a glossary of new terms and suggested further reading. This is useful for self-study as it allows the readers to consolidate the new material and monitor their own progress.

To give an example of McCully's student-friendly approach to difficult concepts, in the introductory chapter the idea of linguistic structure is presented by an analogy to a train timetable, where scheduled trains are recognized as the same entities regardless of their actual arrival time or number of carriages. In this and the following chapters concepts such as minimal pairs, distribution and contrastiveness are presented before the introduction of technical terms, which is an original idea and breaks up the material into manageable small steps. The introduction also deals with common mistakes (e.g. how many consonants there are in a word) and spoken vs written language. All of these will help readers to disassociate themselves from written language and to learn to transcribe.

The subsequent chapters continue in the same spirit. By way of illustration, consonants are classified using features of production and perception such as place, manner and voice. An inventory of English consonants is presented through a number of contrasts, thus arriving at an unsystematic list of segments followed by suggestions how to systematize them, which leads in to the next chapter. Alas, we find hardly anything on aspects of the production of consonants. Voicing is identified by means of simple do-it-yourself experiments, followed by a list of voiceless–voiced oppositions, with a mention of those that lack symmetry: (i.e. sonorants and the glottal fricative /h/). The terms themselves are presented later, which is a fresh approach, as it leads the readers to discover things for themselves and think about the concepts first. The author then discusses the nasals and fricatives from the list. This is a good point, because it leads the beginner step by step, but might also be a slight disadvantage as it is difficult to read sections of the book independently of one another. McCully's hands-on approach has the additional advantage of teaching analytical skills right from the first contact with the subject and it continues throughout the book. So far, so good.

The title of McCully's textbook echoes that of John Harris’ English sound structure, a thought-provoking introduction to phonological theory and phonology of English. And that is perhaps indicative of its main focus. The issues in the present textbook are presented from a phonological perspective, and phonetics seems to be only a vehicle for phonological analysis. The lack of detailed descriptions of speech production and the vocal tract is a weakness of the book. To a reader unfamiliar with the subject, such a cursory treatment of phonetics might give the mistaken impression that there is not much more to it than articulatory labels.

The coverage of English and general phonetics does not seem the textbook's forte and what strikes me is its lack of attention to detail. For example, in chapter 8 (p. 122) we find a somewhat fuzzy statement about ‘a vowel whose pronunciation is something like /ʌ/’. Further on that page there is a (by the author's own admission crude) proposition that ‘the symbol /ʌ/ is reserved exclusively for representing vowels in stressed syllables’. That is not strictly true, as English has a number of adjectives with the negative prefix un- in which the strut vowel is unstressed. Incidentally, even though Accents of English is referred to, Wells’ (Reference Wells1982) keywords, which are now commonly used in phonetic and language variation textbooks, are not adopted.

Other examples where more precision is called for include: a definition (p. 218) of the glottal stop that remarks on the consonant's phonemic status, but curiously makes no mention of its articulation; and an experiment that asks the reader to produce several English words containing the voiceless bilabial plosive /p/ and reflect on the articulatory characteristics of each token (p. 10). This in itself is another interesting example of the author's practical approach to theoretical issues. It is a shame that this subsection also contains an incorrect statement that ‘Such a puff of air, occurring in this environment (initially, in a stressed syllable), is known as plosion or aspiration’, where no distinction is made between the two articulatory phenomena, which certainly are distinct even if in some contexts they do co-occur.

Elsewhere (pp. 38–9), what is supposed to constitute a discussion of manner of articulation is instead an extended discussion of sounds defined as [+continuant], followed by a mention of plosives and their classification, albeit a perfunctory one which does not facilitate an understanding of the details of stricture types and what happens in the vocal tract. Readers are therefore unlikely to understand the motivation behind the author's choice to label /ʃ ʒ/ as palatal fricatives (p. 43), while the corresponding affricates /tʃ dʒ/ are classified as palato-alveolar. Why is the (now universally adopted) term postalveolar not applied to both pairs?

Yet another example of this somewhat sketchy treatment of phonetics is the cardinal vowel system, here presented mainly as a set of reference points. What is lacking is an explanation of the problem areas, i.e. of the relationship between their articulatory and auditory qualities. The diagram (p. 113) is not helpful either: placed in the mid-sagittal section of the vocal tract, cardinals 1 and 4 are so front that they end up in the postalveolar region.

In general, the phonetics appears to be somewhat out of date. For example, in the references section we find Principles of the IPA (1949). The same is true of a number of other standard works: Roach (Reference Roach1991/2001), Gimson (revised by Cruttenden Reference Cruttenden1994/2008) Clark & Yallop (Reference Clark and Yallop1990/1995), Crystal's Dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (Reference Crystal1991/2008), which raises the question why their respective more recent editions have not been consulted. Another weakness is also an insufficient coverage of topics usually presented in a more detailed manner in introductory phonetics textbooks, such as voice production, articulation or airstream mechanisms. The book would also have benefited from illustrations of the material with spectrograms and waveforms. As it is, McCully's publication is more of an introduction to phonology, rather than phonetics and phonology. For this reason, one should exercise caution when including it on an introductory course reading list. It needs to be supplemented with more phonetically oriented descriptive sources. Without a teacher's guidance, students will miss out on the intricate world of phonetics.