Throughout my experience as a linguist, the gulf between linguistic theory and most branches of applied linguistics has been wide. At graduate-school classes in the 1960s and 1970s, I was never invited to think about the evidence for general phonological theory that might be gleaned from (for example) developmental disorders in speech acquisition. I was aware that Fundamentals of language (Jakobson & Halle Reference Jakobson and Halle1956) included some remarks by Roman Jakobson on aphasia, but I regarded that as mainly an illustration of Jakobson's extraordinary polymathy, alongside his writings on Pushkin, Baudelaire and Yeats – a kind of interest that an ordinary linguist need not feel obliged to emulate. Later, I discovered ‘Natural Phonology’ (Donegan & Stampe Reference Donegan, Stampe and Dinnsen1979), with its emphasis on discourse contexts (attentive vs. inattentive articulation, speech rate and such like), but again I did not come away with the feeling that attention to such fine details of language-in-use was essential for phonology's core business.
This book is designed to shake the complacency of readers who share the somewhat blasé attitude that I have just described in myself. As Pennington puts it in her introductory chapter, ‘the previous generation of linguists has perhaps been too quick to … make generalizations in the form of phonological rules that abstract away from the details of speech data’ (p. 13). Apart from the introduction, there are ten chapters: on phonological acquisition in infancy (Shelley L. Velleman & Marilyn M. Vihman), developmental phonological disorders (Fiona E. Gibbon), phonology in discourse contexts (Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen) and in sociolinguistics (Paul Kerswill & Linda Shockey), contact phonology (Norval Smith), second-language phonology (Paola Escudero), the visual element in phonology (Debra M. Hardison), phonology and literacy (Keiko Koda), technological advances relevant to phonology (Dorothy M. Chun) and ‘sounds, brain and evolution’ (April McMahon).
After reading the book, I am hard pressed to identify any phonological issue of which one can confidently say that none of the interfaces discussed in this book could ever be relevant to it. Consider even an issue that seems rather remote from ‘the details of speech data’, such as whether a particular morpho(phono)logical alternation should be handled phonologically or regarded as an instance of partial suppletion. Koda, in her chapter on phonology and literacy, discusses research on word-naming speed in languages with ‘shallow’ (phonetically transparent) orthographies, such as Spanish, and ones with ‘deep’ orthographies (which place more emphasis on consistent encoding of morphological units), such as Chinese and (allegedly) Hebrew. It is conceivable that work of the kind that Koda describes, despite its practical focus on acquiring L1 or L2 literacy, could turn out to have implications for fundamental theoretical issues at the morphology–phonology interface.
I admit too that several of the topics covered in this book are ones which it would have profited me over the years to know more about. One such is phonology in infancy (discussed by Velleman & Vihman), which is related to the issue of developmental disorders affecting phonology (on which Gibbon does much more than merely update Jakobson). Also, the chapter on the visual element in phonological perception (Hardison) is a useful antidote to the view that phonology is purely about speech sounds. (I myself can testify that, in noisy environments, I find it difficult to follow a conversation unless I am wearing my spectacles.)
Of all the chapters, the one with the most ‘mainstream’ feel is that of Kerswill & Shockey on phonology and sociolinguistics. However, the mainstream in question is that of sociolinguistics (for which phonological variation has long been a staple source of data) rather than of phonology itself. By contrast, perhaps the last mainstream chapter, but also to me the most interesting, is that of McMahon on phonology and language evolution. Why are segmental and prosodic phenomena so often in practice treated separately? Perhaps it is because (McMahon suggests) they really are separate, with prosody having a larger innate component and being in some respects homologous with primate vocalisations, whereas segmental aspects of phonology have arisen independently. I was surprised, though, to find in McMahon's chapter no mention of Peter MacNeilage's ‘frame-content’ theory of speech evolution (MacNeilage Reference MacNeilage1998).
Only once have I encountered a scholarly book or article in linguistics that cites no published work at all, namely Doing phonology: observing, recording, interpreting (Kelly & Local Reference Kelly and Local1989). It is intriguing therefore to find Kelly & Local's work discussed prominently in Couper-Kuhlen's chapter on patterns of phonology in discourse contexts, where she applauds the authors' emphasis on careful transcription of phonetic detail. However, the topic of this chapter seems to me less likely to have useful spin-offs for phonological theory than those I have discussed briefly so far. The same applies to the chapters on contact phonology (Smith) and second-language phonology (Escudero). But that is just a guess on my part.
The final chapter again reminds me of my graduate school days in London, in an oblique fashion. We had many hours of ear-training, with transcription of nonsense dictation and reading aloud of IPA-transcribed texts. However, our training involved almost no technology more elaborate than pen, paper and handouts manufactured with Gestetner machines or ditto masters. I recall being shown a Kaye sonograph and gazing in wonder at its customised graph paper with the curiously curved vertical axis, but I do not recall ever using it. Chun's chapter on technological advances in speech technology demonstrates how totally the landscape has changed. Will these changes, and the other developments summarised in this book, fundamentally affect how mainstream phonology is done? Readers will make up their own minds.
A final point relates to the claim that there is nothing peculiar to both humans and language except for recursion (Hauser et al. Reference Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch2002). This claim has caused quite a stir – not surprisingly, since Noam Chomsky is one of its authors. What are its implications for phonology? Given that in phonology there is no recursion, the consequence must be either that phonology is not peculiar to humans or else that, if it is peculiar to humans, it is only because of the interface between phonology and some domain which does show evidence of recursion. Whether or not that is true, the controversy between Hauser et al. on the one hand and Pinker & Jackendoff (Reference Pinker and Jackendoff2005) on the other supplies a pressing reason for phonologists to interest themselves in issues such as those dealt with in this book. So I urge readers of Phonology to take the book seriously. Apart from anything else, the bibliographies attached to each chapter are extensive and will serve as starting-points for inquiry into areas that will be unfamiliar to most of us.
