There are many introductory textbooks in phonology available for students of linguistics, but few of them sufficiently enphasize the importance of data analysis. Bruce Hayes manages to accomplish this overarching goal in Introductory Phonology. This is an introductory course book specifically designed for students entering the field for the first time. This particular text stands out from others because, while many equip the novice with a theoretical background, Introductory Phonology offers a more hands-on approach to learning through its wealth of exercises, internet resources (from phonological atlases to Ph.D. theses) and tips for fieldwork, challenging students to discover and formalize, thereby putting theory into practice. Introductory Phonology can be used as a reliable second-term course book, assuming that students have already taken a course in general phonetics in the first term.
The book has fifteen chapters that increase gradually in difficulty towards the end, where a list of exercises is given, covering many phonological phenomena in many languages. There is no key to exercises, which encourages students to exchange ideas and enter into discussions with peers and teachers. A ‘Further reading’ reference section concludes each chapter. These references are hand-picked and offer a wide range of titles that are relevant to the topic under investigation. The book has a dedicated website which contains sound files, sample term papers, a list of interesting suggestions for further research in several languages, and many other useful resources.
Chapter 1 is intended to be a review of students’ existing knowledge of phonetics, while Chapter 2 explains the difference between phonology and phonetics, and gives an inventory of the English phonemes followed by a short discussion on contrast and allophonic variation (including /n/ and /l/ in English). Using only notations that are widely recognised among phonologists, the chapter focuses on formalizing phonological rules, working through the basics of describing environments, underlying representations and derivations with illustrations from English phonemes. Phonemes in other languages are dealt with in the second part of the chapter, where the reader is encouraged to do a phonemic analysis of data from the Maasai language, compiling local environments.
Chapter 3 builds on the basic goals of phonological analysis and gives a more detailed account of more complex issues in analysing a language, such as the psychological reality of the phoneme, audibility of fine distinctions, the criterion of phonetic similarity, free variation and phonotactics. The author emphasises that contrastiveness plays a major role in the perception of language users showing that the same sound that distinguishes between minimal pairs in a language may not be heard by speakers of other languages or dialects. With reference to variation and elicitation, Hayes’ approach provides the fieldwork phonologist with practical advice on how to elicit informal variants from consultants. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion on contextually limited contrast between phonemes and zero, and phonotactics, including rules and constraints. Instead of giving an introduction to Optimality Theory at this stage, the author leaves readers to decide which theory they should adopt and provides a list of relevant, more advanced textbooks in the further reading section.
Chapter 4 is devoted to features. Most of the features presented are taken from The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle Reference Chomsky and Halle1968) except for tonal features which are dealt with in chapter 15. The chapter benefits from a section on when and how to use features in writing rules, and clarifies which particular features should be included to capture natural class and assimilation. The last section presents feature charts for vowels, consonants and diacritics. The exercises focus on the writing of phonological rules to a hypothetical language using the features presented in the chapter.
Chapter 5 looks at morphology from a phonological point of view, and covers notation, compounding, morphological structure, functions of morphology, writing morphological rules, productivity and morphological analysis. The exercises concentrate on writing inflectional rules and providing derivations for Japanese verbs.
Chapter 6 focuses on phonological alternations and includes a section on the alternations in English /t/-final stems that expands on some phonological rules of American English such as preglottallization, tapping and aspiration. A graph illustrating multi-component derivations for quote, quotable and quotation is given. The phonological component stresses that the underlying form is not the most important and shows how preglottalization, tapping and aspiration apply as phonetic interpretations to the sequences of phonemes emerging from the morphology. Neutralization is illustrated with examples that prove that alternations are not only allophonic: Korean stop nasalization, postnasal /t/ deletion in American English (compare planter/planner, stunting/stunning, punting/punning), and Russian voicing assimilation. Chapter 7 builds further on phonological alternation and gives a short discussion of phonemic environments based on two phonological rules of North American Engish: /aɪ/ raising, and tapping. The focus of the chapter is rule ordering in Chimwiini, a language that contains many alternations between long and short vowels, following a system which is reducible to phonological rules such as: word-final lengthening, preantepenultimate shortening, phrase-final shortening and pre-long shortening.
Chapter 8 lays out a general method for morphophonemic analysis. The first step is to examine the data and make a provisional division of the forms into morphemes in order to find the morphemes that alternate and locate its allomorphs. The target is to determine the underlying representations. Evidence from Lardil (Australian) proves that ‘it is a fairly dramatic instance of a language in which the underlying form of a stem cannot be determined from its isolation form’ (p. 166).
Chapter 9 concentrates on productivity and surveys phonological rules with varying degrees of productivity showing that vowel nasalization in American English is a fully productive phonological rule, and postnasal /t/ deletion in American English is almost fully productive: the instances where the rule applies are judged as more casual. On the other hand, /f/ voicing in English is given as an example of a rule of lesser productivity and the author concludes that such a rule does exist, but it is not fully productive and can coexist with memorized forms. To show this, the author gives the example of the two plural forms of the word dwarf: dwarfs/dwarves, stating that most people now say dwarfs (based on Google hit counts, p. 194). The chapter also introduces basic experiments in productivity such as wug tests which were pioneered in the 1950s by Jean Berko Gleason. The idea of these tests is to teach consultants a hypothetical new word (for example ‘wug’) and ask them to provide an inflected form of the word (the plural of ‘wug’), forcing them to apply the rules of their language.
Chapter 10 touches on the role of morphology and syntax in phonological analysis. According to Hayes, there are two mechanisms that mediate between grammar and phonology: bounding domains and edge-sensitive rules. Word-bounded rules are illustrated with English minimal and near-minimal pairs which can uncover distinct underlying representations, while non-bounded rules are illustrated by examples of the intrusive r in Standard British English. Chapter 11 explains the dichotomy between phonology and historical linguistics, and introduces phenomena such as restructuring and phoneme creation, with examples from American English and German.
Chapter 12 explores the extent to which a phonological analysis can use underlying elements that are different from surface forms. A case study in abstract analysis is outlined, namely, the well-known Polish Vowel ~ Zero Alternations. There is also a brief summary of the analysis done by Chomsky & Halle (Reference Chomsky and Halle1968) on English stress. Chapter 13 is devoted to syllables as phonological constituents. The chapter explains how syllabification works following Kahn's (Reference Kahn1976) syllabification algorithm: node assignment, onset and coda formation. There is also an additional Chapter 13A, on syllabification in English, available online, which was not included in the book because of its reference to ambisyllabicity, a hypothesis that is still controversial in phonology.
Chapter 14 focuses on stress, stress rules and syllable weight. The author emphasises that stress is attached to syllables rather than segments and gives a succinct overview of some general properties of stress. An analysis of the predictability of stress and stress rules is provided with examples from Polish and Macedonian. The relevance of syllable weight is shown independently of their role in stress rules. Quantitative meter is introduced and illustrated with examples from classical Persian verse as well as Greek and Latin. The chapter ends with rules for stress assignment in Classical Arabic and English arguing for the principle of syllabification instead of segments to express English stress rules.
Chapter 15 offers a survey of suprasegmental phenomena, and the system of phrasal stress on which English intonation depends. Tone, intonation and pitch accent languages are introduced systematically and represented in terms of Low and High tones with examples of pitch tracks of some forms from Igbo, English and Japanese. Without giving a detailed overview of intonation theories and approaches, the author introduces English intonation using the autosegmental framework and devotes specific attention to some of the more common tunes of English.
Overall, Introductory Phonology is an impeccably written textbook with many student-friendly features. The book does not favour any particular school of phonology, and the author does not stray into controversial contemporary issues, giving students the opportunity to explore different approaches and frameworks by directing them to other sources mentioned in the ‘Further reading’ sections. The examples used to accompany phonological phenomena and rules cover a wide range of languages, giving the book a more holistic approach. With respect to the many examples from casual American English used to illustrate various phonological rules throughout the book, though they may be especially familiar to speakers of American English, they may not be as relevant to speakers of other varieties of English.
Although the terminology has been reduced to a minimum, the prose seems to be dense at times due to the myriad new terms and phonological rules introduced. The book would benefit from a glossary of terms. In addition, there are a significant number of typos and errors that can be misleading in the text, whose correction can be found online. Despite these minor issues, the book remains an invaluable resource for any linguist.
Introductory Phonology is, in my opinion, the best contemporary introduction to the subject available for undergraduate students. With this book, Bruce Hayes may have accomplished for phonology what Peter Ladefoged did with his A Course in Phonetics (Ladefoged Reference Ladefoged2005), offering us an introductory textbook that should be compulsory reading on any course reading list.
