Goldsmith's (Reference Goldsmith1995) Handbook of phonological theory provided an influential overview of the field in the mid-90s, earning a well-deserved place on the shelf of practising phonologists. The volume under review is not the first to attempt to update this classic work. Two other recent handbooks of comparable length and scope are the second edition of Goldsmith (Goldsmith et al. Reference Goldsmith, Jason and Yu2011), and de Lacy's (Reference de Lacy2007) well-received Cambridge handbook of phonology. Besides evaluating how well the current work meets the general expectations that readers have for a handbook, this review must necessarily also address the inevitable questions: why yet another handbook of phonology just now?; how does this volume distinguish itself from its competitors?; does this work fill a gap that is not met by the other handbooks?

The names of the editors and authors provide the first clue to what makes this volume distinctive. Almost all contributors work and/or received their PhDs in Europe, whereas North American phonologists dominate the other handbooks. The European perspective is felt in several of the core chapters in the second and longest part of the volume, ‘Research issues’, which discuss certain approaches – such as Element Theory, Government Phonology and CV theory – that tend to be less well known in North America. The chapter by Botma, Kula & Nasukawa on ‘Features’ has a comprehensive discussion of the phonetic motivation for different feature theories in early generative phonology, followed by a clear introduction to Element Theory. One of the distinctive properties of Element Theory is that the same feature can have different phonetic realisations, depending on the featural configuration (in particular, which other feature is the head of the configuration). The advantages of representing voicing and nasality with a single feature are exemplified with a detailed analysis of alternations involving nasal prefixes in Zoque. Péter Szigetvári's chapter on ‘Syllables’ follows a critical historical survey of motivations for syllable structure with an exceptionally clear introduction to CV theory, a theory which essentially dispenses with the syllable as a constituent. As someone who was not trained in this approach, I read the chapter with scepticism. However, by the end of it I felt I had an appreciative understanding of how strict CV licensing can account for classic problems like restrictions on consonant and vowel clusters which are usually considered motivations for syllable structure. Both this chapter and the one on features will be read with interest by phonologists wishing to understand the highlighted theories better. They will surely be recommended to students as useful introductory chapters by phonologists working in the theories presented. However, as the focus in these chapters is on the particular theories under discussion, they are not intended to provide a useful guide to current research and issues in other frameworks.

The chapters on derivations and constraints take a broader theoretical perspective. Patrik Bye's chapter on ‘Derivations’ is recommended reading for its exceptionally thoughtful and thorough overview of the history of derivations in phonology and the problems they were intended to solve. Challenges for non-derivational approaches – especially, but not only, Optimality Theory (OT) – and current solutions are presented clearly, with an emphasis on the ‘creative tension’ between derivational and non-derivational ways of understanding the same phonological problems. The immediately following chapter, Christian Uffmann's on ‘Constraint-based phonology,’ nicely complements Bye's. It shows how non-derivational approaches, notably OT, resulted from a growing concern with the role of surface-based constraints in conditioning phonological processes, accompanied by a wariness towards the abstractness introduced by extrinsic rule ordering. The chapter ends with an admirably succinct sketch of the basic principles of classic OT.

Other strong chapters in Part II are those of Silke Hamann on the ‘Phonetics–phonology interface’ and Anthi Revithiadou & Vassilios Spyropoulos on the ‘Syntax–phonology interface’. Both of these interface chapters provide lucid and up-to-date overviews of issues and approaches to their respective topics. Each chapter includes a case study which sketches how one particular current model of the interface works. The phonetics–phonology chapter introduces the Bi-Phon model (Boersma & Hamann Reference Boersma, Hamann, Boersma and Hamann2009) in a particularly accessible way, using this model to illustrate the general need in interface research to combine experimental studies with explicit formal modelling. The case study in the syntax–phonology chapter argues that prosody influences the choice of the surface position of grammatical subjects in Modern Greek. As most work on the syntax–phonology interface concerns the role of syntax in defining phonological domains, this chapter makes a refreshing contribution in demonstrating the opposite direction of influence. In both of these chapters, though, a more detailed presentation of the case studies would have been welcome.

Part II is rounded out by chapters on what one might call ‘external interfaces’. Chloë R. Marshall's chapter on ‘Sign language phonology’ provides a compact history and overview of research issues in this field, structured around a presentation of similarities and differences between spoken and signed language phonologies, illustrated (mainly) with examples from British Sign Language. The sections on the design of psycholinguistic experiments that compare signed and spoken languages and on what signed languages might tell us about the evolution of language are particularly useful. Heidi Altmann & Barış Kabak's chapter on ‘Second language phonology’ provides a phonologically informed overview of this field, which, as they note, is still ‘in its infancy’ as a research area for theoretical phonologists. The chapter surveys recent psycholinguistic and phonetic work on the perception and production of second language learners, discussing the role of markedness universals, as well as first language phonology, in accounting for findings. Dirk-Bart den Ouden's chapter on ‘Phonological disorders’ provides a thorough guide to the history and recent literature of this field. The chapter is unfortunately very densely written, sketching so many individual studies one after another that it does not clearly meet its goal of showing how phonological theory has informed research in this area and how studies of phonological disorders present challenges to phonological theory.

Part II contains just two chapters which are disappointing precisely because they do not address in enough detail phonological research issues related to their topics. Diana Apoussidou's chapter on ‘Stress’, after the most cursory of surveys of issues in the phonetics and phonology of stress, develops a computational learning algorithm for stress and tests it on a highly lexicalised corner of the lexical stress system of Modern Greek. While this algorithm represents an interesting new technique for modelling and testing analyses of stress, more useful in a handbook article would have been a discussion of what the technique can tell us about the typology and learnability of stress systems in general. Nivedita Mani's chapter on ‘Phonological acquisition’ provides a knowledgeable and up-to-date survey of how perception studies track infants' (up to age two) acquisition of the phoneme system in their native language. Research issues of interest to most phonologists – namely, the role that markedness and learnability have played in the study of acquisition – are not taken up, though, perhaps because they are more pertinent in studying the development of phonological production of children over the age of two.

Besides this main set of chapters on research issues, the volume contains three other parts. Part I, on ‘Research methodology’, contains two chapters, one on field methods and the other on language acquisition. Mary Pearce's short chapter on ‘Methodology in field phonology’ is, for some reason, written as a ‘how to’ guide for theoretical phonologists who would like to do some fieldwork, and the chapter's thoughtful checklist of issues and techniques might well be helpful for readers with some experience at fieldwork. A more useful aim for a handbook chapter would have been to discuss the role of phonological fieldwork in providing much of the data that theories test themselves on. And given the quotation from Beckman & Kingston (Reference Beckman, Kingston, Kingston and Beckman1990: 3) cited on page 346 of the volume suggesting that laboratory phonology aims to develop ‘observational techniques that go beyond standard field methods’, one would have appreciated some comparison of the goals and methods of ‘standard field linguistics’ with those of laboratory phonology. The chapter by Tania S. Zamuner & Elizabeth K. Johnson on ‘Methodology in phonological acquisition’ provides a critical survey of the kinds of information that can be gleaned from different experimental techniques for studying developmental speech perception and production. This chapter and the one by Mani in Part II contain some of the same information, and one wonders why the discussion of phonological acquisition was spread out over two chapters. It is also unclear what either practising theoretical phonologists or their students are expected to glean from this chapter, which seems to be aimed exclusively at readers with a considerable background in phonological acquisition. At the end of Part I, one wishes the editors' introduction had explained the choice of chapters and headings. It was unclear to this reader why they consider methodology an issue deserving a separate section in a handbook of phonology, and why these two particular areas are discussed under methodology.

Part III is entitled ‘New directions’, and contains two chapters, one on laboratory phonology and one on usage-based phonology. One wonders, naturally, why laboratory phonology is labelled a ‘new’ direction, when the conference series in this field began over twenty years ago. One also wonders why there should be two chapters on the phonetics–phonology interface. The introductory section of Taehong Cho's chapter on ‘Laboratory phonology’ almost necessarily covers much of the same ground as the introduction to Hamann's chapter. The remainder of the chapter is narrowly concerned with prosodic strengthening in production and speech comprehension. The discussion is knowledgeable, and the author makes a persuasive case for the importance of prosody in structuring words and utterances. However, one does not feel that a chapter with such a specific focus serves as a useful introduction to a field as broad as laboratory phonology. Also, one misses a discussion of the connection between the results of the phonetic studies presented and the way various phonological theories have encoded notions of boundary strength. Daniel Silverman's chapter on his theory of ‘Usage-based phonology’ is concerned mainly with sound change. It provides a useful survey of work on historical phonology, including a clear introduction to recent phonetic approaches to sound change and influential current views of how misperception might lead to sound change. However, it is hard to see how this chapter defines a new direction for synchronic phonology. As Hamann's chapter notes, the usage-based approach allows for no connection between phonetics and phonological theory. It is furthermore unclear how a wide range of either synchronic or diachronic phonological processes can be accounted for in usage-based terms.

Part IV, ‘History of the field’, consists only of Tobias Scheer's long chapter on ‘Issues in the development of generative phonology’. This comprehensive historical overview takes as a point of departure Anderson's (Reference Anderson1985) proposal that phonological theory alternates between a preoccupation with representations (structure) and with computations. Anderson (Reference Anderson1985) was written at the height of the last preoccupation with representations, and, as Scheer points out, he correctly predicted that a swing towards computations (i.e. Optimality Theory) must be on the horizon. A second organising thread follows several issues that arose from Chomsky & Halle (Reference Chomsky and Halle1968) and drove research for many years after: the abstractness that a derivational approach can lead to, how best to encode relatedness of alternating forms, how best to encode ill-formedness, and the type of computational instruction. While not everyone will appreciate the rather florid style of this chapter, it displays a breadth and depth of knowledge of the field and an originality of viewpoint that make it a ‘must read’ for any serious phonologist.

This review should make it clear that many chapters in this volume provide us with what readers are looking for in a handbook article: a succinct introduction and up-to-date guide to the literature in a new research area suited both to graduate students and professionals. In addition, several chapters fill a gap by presenting lucid discussion of theories that are not as well covered by other handbooks. The volume accurately reflects its times, as the choice of chapters reveals a growing interest in the methodologies and findings of psycholinguistics and phonetics in studying sound systems, and a growing interest in interfaces. The chapters on ‘Derivations’, ‘Constraint-based phonology’ and ‘Issues in the development of generative phonology’ taken together provide a stimulating history of the development of theories of computation in generative phonology that cannot be found anywhere else. As a result, the volume indeed finds its own niche on a shelf of handbooks of phonology.