This substantial and strikingly original volume is, as the authors say, ‘unique’, combining, as it does, a concise but very far more than just adequate phonetic introduction to English pronunciation together with extensive amounts of material for use in practising it. It is plainly aimed at fully dedicated, fairly sophisticated intermediate and advanced students. In physical appearance, it follows the slightly square style of books like the well-established Collins & Mees (Reference Collins and Mees2013). It has been based on a formula originated by the late Beverley Collins who unfortunately did not live to put his proposals into action himself. The book is, incidentally, notably free from mistakes or misprints.
It offers a decidedly ‘twenty-first-century model’ of General British pronunciation (see Cruttenden (Reference Cruttenden2014: 4ff. for this term). The first two concise yet remarkably complete and up-to-date chapters (pp. 1–33) deal with basic concepts and the identities of the individual phonemes. Not only in these theoretical-descriptive chapters but throughout the book, there is exceptional ampleness of effective illustrations including over sixty excellent vowel charts, among which there are items that well support the authors’ claims of modernity, and, along with these, more than a hundred clear vocal tract drawings. Much extra information is incorporated within the book's practice sections.
From Chapter 3 onwards we have the main division of the book, most of whose sections are headed ‘Practice’ and which are accompanied by web-based audio files (www.routledge.com/cw/carley). Each phoneme is illustrated firstly by its key features, variant realisations and transcription. Then the reader can see and hear its occurrence in single words. Next come examples of the phoneme repeatedly found in short phrases. This is regularly followed by exactly twenty one-line sentences graduated from a first with about half a dozen words to a last one of twice that length. The chapter's final demonstration is in one or more dialogues of variable length (and variable plausibility due to the phonetic restrictions). This alone provides a truly outstanding fullness of choice of practice materials. Yet, in addition to the chapters on individual phonemes, there are also very sizeable chapters ‘providing practice in distinguishing between pairs’ of phonemes ‘which learners tend to confuse’ supplying minimal pairs demonstrating contrasts in word-initial, word-medial and word-final positions as well as words, phrases and sentences containing both sounds. Chapter 10 deals with clusters, elisions and epenthesis (see the comments below about connected speech).
Their practice materials contain almost exclusively high-frequency words. Users are able to check with phonetic transcriptions supplied in the companion website to be sure that they employ appropriate pronunciations. This is a true necessity only for the following thirty or so relatively uncommon words out of the many hundreds occurring: azalea, Bangor, Berwick, Beaujolais, blithering, Blyth, bourgeoisie, bungee, Caesarean, Caleb, corsage, crocheted, clerk, Denise, espionage, gauge, genre, Hawick, Keira, Levi, meringue, Nevada, pashmina, ragout, schnapps, Sean, schadenfreude, Sharon, tambour, tortellini, tournedos, tournament and whooping cough.
There are ‘over 30 hours’ of recordings of all the practice material, well performed by two speakers, one male and one female, both aged 19 years and both brought up in England, thereby indisputably bearing out the claim to provide twenty-first-century models of pronunciation. Indeed the two speakers may be heard to employ certain usages which are more current than those represented in the two most important reference works on the accent, namely the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (Jones Reference Jones, Roach, Setter and Esling2011) and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (Wells Reference Wells2008). The authors acknowledge this by observing that the set of phonetic symbols employed gives preference to harmony with those found in ‘most other published materials and dictionaries’ over the explicit representation of any very recent developments of current British usage. Thus, for example, they employ the symbol /æ/ not /a/ for the TRAP vowel and denote the SQUARE phoneme with the notation /eə/ even though the speakers may be heard to use [ɛː] in saying a word like heir. The chapter on vowels has several sections on ‘Recent developments’, including ‘Happy tensing’, the product of which process the authors ‘simply call weak FLEECE’.
Also making this volume strikingly more complete than any comparable practice book is the inclusion of a chapter of forty-four pages devoted to ‘Weak vowels and weak forms’. Less attention is paid to what might be called ‘weak consonants’ as found in unselfconscious English, though some are covered in Chapter 10 and several good examples are found in Chapter 12. More dialogue containing these forms would be a useful tool.
Moreover, there is an elephant in the room and its name is Prosody. Only a single page is devoted to ‘Stress’ and of intonation – there is really no mention. If the remaining authors now proceed to produce a sister volume which provides similarly ample treatment of these matters, there will be occasion for much satisfaction.
