According to the introduction, The Cambridge handbook of phonology aims to provide summaries of current issues in phonological theory, for readers who are ‘upper-level undergraduate students and above’ (p. 2). Overall, the book succeeds admirably in meeting these stated goals. Most chapters are well suited as gateways to the research literature. While some familiarity with basic terms in linguistics, especially phonetics, is assumed, the phonological concepts that are crucial to each chapter are for the most part explicitly defined.

The Handbook is well structured on several levels. The chapters are conveniently grouped into thematic sections, and the internal organisation of the chapters is remarkably consistent for a multi-author book. Nearly all chapters begin with an explicit definition of the chapter's topic and a statement of what specific aspects will be addressed. There are also structural similarities among the chapters in the different parts of the book.

Part I, ‘Conceptual issues’, covers overarching topics in phonological theory, with ‘The pursuit of theory’ (Alan Prince), ‘Functionalism in phonology’ (Matthew Gordon), ‘Markedness in phonology’ (Keren Rice), ‘Derivations and levels of representation’ (John J. McCarthy), ‘Representation’ (John Harris) and ‘Contrast’ (Donca Steriade). Although the Handbook as a whole does not attempt to be a historical survey (p. 2), most Part I chapters do provide a significant amount of historical context, which is useful for a deeper understanding of chapters in later parts of the book. A striking example is Harris's chapter on representation, which provides a brief but broad overview of multiple approaches to segmental and prosodic representation that are good to keep in mind while reading later chapters specifically devoted to particular implementations of features or prosodic structure.

Parts II and III discuss individual aspects of phonological representations or phenomena. The focus of Part II is prosodic phonology, with chapters on ‘The syllable’ (Draga Zec), ‘Feet and metrical stress’ (René Kager), ‘Tone’ (Moira Yip), ‘Intonation’ (Carlos Gussenhoven) and a synthesis chapter, ‘The interaction of tone, sonority, and prosodic structure’ (Paul de Lacy). Part III covers segmental and featural phonology, namely, ‘Segmental features’ (T. A. Hall), ‘Local assimilation and constraint interaction’ (Eric Baković), ‘Harmony’ (Diana Archangeli & Douglas Pulleyblank) and ‘Dissimilation in grammar and the lexicon’ (John D. Alderete & Stefan A. Frisch). Nearly all chapters in these sections include a descriptive or typological overview of the pattern in question, along with formalisation and analysis. Some chapters in Parts II and III also provide a historical context, such as Gussenhoven on intonation and Alderete & Frisch on dissimilation.

Most chapters in Part IV, ‘Internal interfaces’, likewise include both descriptive or typological generalisations and phonological analysis. This is seen in ‘The syntax–phonology interface’ (Hubert Truckenbrodt) and in two chapters addressing the morphology–phonology interface, ‘Morpheme position’ (Adam Ussishkin) and ‘Reduplication’ (Suzanne Urbanczyk). The fourth chapter in Part IV, ‘The phonetics–phonology interface’ (John Kingston), takes a somewhat idiosyncratic approach. Most of the discussion in this chapter pursues in depth certain specific phonological patterns that parallel phonetic patterns, without directly addressing the nature of the interface between phonetics and phonology – as part of an explicit model of linguistic competence – that could give rise to these parallels. This chapter also presupposes rather technical phonetics knowledge; terms such as ‘pole’ and ‘zero’ are used without elaboration.

Many of the chapters in Parts II through IV choose one particular formalism or model and explore it in detail; for example, Zec's approach to syllable structure assumes moraic theory, and Truckenbrodt's discussion of the syntax–phonology interface focuses on phonological phrasing in the Align/Wrap-XP system. However, nearly all chapters include at least a few citations to alternative approaches, and some explicitly include discussion of alternatives.

Part V, ‘External interfaces’, turns to sources of external evidence in phonology. The chapters on ‘Diachronic phonology’ (Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero), ‘Variation and optionality’ (Arto Anttila) and ‘Learnability’ (Bruce Tesar) compare and contrast alternative approaches to these topics, while ‘Acquiring phonology’ (Paula Fikkert) and ‘Phonological impairment in children and adults’ (Barbara Bernhardt & Joseph Paul Stemberger) present empirical phenomena and consider their implications for general phonological theory.

One additional chapter opens the book: ‘Themes in phonology’ (Paul de Lacy) provides a road map for the Handbook and places it in the context of phonological theory as it has developed over the last half century, structured conceptually in terms of phonological representations, phonological ‘derivations’ (processes, phenomena), and the interplay between the two. This chapter also presents a brief overview of Optimality Theory (OT), the framework that is used to formalise the phonological analyses in most of the subsequent chapters (although a few authors deliberately refrain from using any OT-specific formalism: Hall on segmental features, Archangeli & Pulleyblank on harmony and Bermúdez-Otero on diachronic phonology).

On the whole, the book is well integrated; nearly all chapters contain at least a few crossreferences to other chapters, although as many as a third of the chapters could usefully have included even more crossreferences. The typesetting is attractive. In particular, phonetic symbols fit into the layout with very few spacing or size problems. A number of examples, however, appear to have been prepared as graphics files; they are slightly lighter in colour, and are rather pixellated. Oddly, this is not limited to OT tableaux, but includes some of the text-only examples as well. Notes are formatted as endnotes rather than footnotes, which is inconvenient (and somewhat surprising in this age of computer typesetting).

Occasionally, one finds questionable factual claims. For example, Zec states that within a syllable, ‘the nucleus contains the most sonorous segment’ (p. 163), but this is not cross-linguistically true, as seen in Tashlhiyt Berber [i.sa.w] ‘he talked’ (Ridouane Reference Ridouane2008: 325), or even in American English yearn [jn]. According to Kager, ‘initial and prefinal syllables are, by far, the most favored locations of stress, followed by stress on the second and final syllable’ (p. 196); this is somewhat misleading, since second syllable stress is considerably less common than final stress (Goedemans & van der Hulst Reference Goedemans, van der Hulst, Haspelmath, Dryer, Gil and Comrie2008). Hall claims that ‘it is usually assumed that if a feature is distinctive in a language then only those sounds for which it is distinctive are marked underlyingly for that feature’ (p. 313), but this is no longer a ‘usual’ assumption for practitioners of OT, in which the principle of richness of the base excludes language-particular restrictions on underlying forms. Gussenhoven's chapter on intonation has two errors among the Japanese examples and their glosses. There are a few typographical errors as well; most are fairly harmless, but a few are potentially confusing, as when laryngeal segments are introduced as [—sonorant] in the text (p. 314), but are represented as [+sonorant] in a table on the following page.

Some of the chapters are very good at connecting their topics to larger concepts. Prince's chapter takes on the fundamental question of theory construction and testing, drawing a useful and thought-provoking distinction between ‘Free-Standing Theories’ (including, but not limited to, OT), whose architecture allows them to make intrinsic predictions, and ‘Theories of Data’, which do not make meaningful predictions before specific data are encountered (as with certain connectionist models, but also SPE phonology; Chomsky & Halle Reference Chomsky and Halle1968). Harris talks about the implications of particular OT proposals for more general implementations of phonological representation. Steriade compares phonological frameworks with respect to their success in accounting for empirical patterns of contrast. Other chapters, however, could have included a bit more discussion of larger implications. Gordon provides a useful sampling of proposals where functional factors have been incorporated into phonological models, but it would be nice to see a discussion of how these proposals fit into or modify OT, or whether (and why) certain phenomena might be more or less amenable to these kinds of explanations. Rice identifies many dimensions of markedness that do not seem to have a single universally unmarked value, but it would also be useful to see an exploration of the consequences of this discovery for the formalisation of markedness constraints in OT. Neither Fikkert nor Bernhardt & Stemberger fully address the question of what it means for phonological theory that some patterns in child phonology or phonological impairment are unattested in typical adult phonology.

Certain topics of recent interest in the field might have been valuable inclusions as chapters in their own right, but are given only brief mention in the Handbook. The Too-Many-Solutions problem (Steriade Reference Steriade, Hanson and Inkelas2009), i.e. the fact that an OT constraint set often predicts more varied phonological responses to markedness violations than are actually attested, comes up in the overview chapter (de Lacy) and the chapter on assimilation (Baković). A related point, the role of markedness as a synchronic vs. a diachronic factor, is addressed to some extent in the chapters on functionalism (Gordon), the phonetics–phonology interface (Kingston) and diachronic phonology (Bermúdez-Otero). Probabilistic approaches to phonology are mentioned in the dissimilation chapter (Alderete & Frisch), while exemplar-based models are briefly described by Gordon and summarised in somewhat more detail by Bermúdez-Otero.

The Handbook is accompanied by a website, with several useful features.Footnote ¹ The whole book, or a specific chapter, can be searched for a text string. Search results give only page numbers plus a few lines of context, so this feature does not replace access to the physical book, but the ability to find page references for a given term or phrase is useful indeed. The website also allows the entire bibliography to be downloaded, in a variety of file formats. Specific reference lists for most chapters are available as well. Other features of the website include a (very short) list of errata; a list of all contributors, with contact information and links to web sites; and a list of general phonology-related web links. The site also provides links to discussion forums on topics corresponding to the book chapters, but attempts (September 2010) to access these with two different web browsers were unsuccessful.

It may be inevitable for this book to be compared to Goldsmith's (Reference Goldsmith1995) Handbook of phonology – even de Lacy makes the comparison in his introduction (p. 1). Some of the chapters owe a certain debt to Goldsmith, even using the relevant chapter of the latter as a background reference or source for typological patterns. Still, the two books turn out to be substantially different, even beyond the pervasive influence of OT in the Handbook. Only six authors appear in both books (Kager, McCarthy, Prince, Steriade, Yip, Zec); among these, only Kager and Yip are writing on the same topic, and their chapters in the Handbook are different in scope or focus from their contributions to Goldsmith (Reference Goldsmith1995). Many core phonological topics are shared by the two books, but there are differences in coverage as well. The Handbook does not include any language case-study chapters; other topics covered only by Goldsmith (Reference Goldsmith1995) include sign language phonology, language games and, interestingly, prosodic morphology, although the influence of prosodic morphology is seen in the the Handbook chapters on morpheme position, reduplication and metrical structure. Conversely, the Handbook includes topics not covered in Goldsmith (Reference Goldsmith1995): variation, learnability, phonological impairment and the phonetics–phonology interface.

Another book targetting a similar audience is McCarthy (Reference McCarthy2004), an annotated anthology of influential OT papers. McCarthy (Reference McCarthy2004) has some overlap with the Handbook, including a handful of chapters on similar topics (often by the same authors), but the two books are still distinct. McCarthy (Reference McCarthy2004) is concerned with conceptual and technical developments within OT. The Handbook, on the other hand, has its fundamental focus on the nature of phonological theory and practice; OT is treated as a framework for implementation rather than as the primary subject of investigation.

In summary, this generally well-edited book meets a need: it presents an overview of central topics in phonology, usually from the perspective of OT, and serves as a bridge to current research. It should be useful both as a textbook and as a reference manual for core topics in phonological theory.