These two books offer complementary material analysing the intonation of a range of languages mostly within the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework. The first book (the Sun-Ah Jun volume) has chapters by various authors describing the prosody of 14 languages within the AM framework, while the second book (the Caroline Féry volume) is a textbook aimed at graduate students and researchers that covers a range of approaches to the analysis of intonation, but it mainly adopts the AM framework.

The Jun volume is a follow-up to the first volume (Jun Reference Jun2005), which dealt with languages such as Cantonese, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and Swedish as well as inter-dialectal variation in English. This second volume handles the prosody of some languages that are less commonly analysed, including Basque, Curaçao Papiamentu, Dalabon, Georgian, Jamaican Creole, Mongolian and West Greenlandic, though there are also chapters on languages that are more widely described such as Arabic, Bengali, Catalan, European Portuguese and Tamil as well as chapters on tonal isoglosses in the Netherlands and dialectal variation in Japanese. Finally, there are two overview chapters at the end of the book, one on the methodology of studying intonation by Sun-Ah Jun & Janet Fletcher, and the other a summary of prosodic typology by Sun-Ah Jun. All the speech material is made available in a dedicated website hosted by the publishers, and this represents a splendid resource, as the opportunity to listen to the example sentences in all the chapters really brings the material to life.

The Féry volume has ten chapters: introduction, phonetic correlates of intonation, low-level prosodic constituents, the link between intonation and syntax, models of intonation, intonation and meaning, word-level tone and stress, a typological comparison of languages, the processing of prosody, and a concluding chapter. The book aims to provide an introduction to all aspects of intonation (apart from the acquisition of intonation, the intonation of non-standard varieties, and intonation in text-to-speech systems; see page 315), so the overview of different models of intonation includes Bolinger's holistic tunes, the constraints of Optimality Theory, and the nuclear tunes proposed by O'Connor and Arnold as well as the AM treatment of intonation; and the material on lexical tones includes a discussion of the historical origin of tones as well as a description of tones in East Asian languages such as Mandarin and Cantonese and the Bantu language Chicheŵa. While the range of the coverage is impressive, the material in some places is quite densely packed, and for example I found it hard to decipher the two-page coverage of left and right-branching word compounds and phrasal compounds in Japanese (pp. 52–53). Nevertheless, the book contains a huge amount of exceptionally valuable material on the theoretical treatment of stress and intonation from many different perspectives, and it includes detailed analysis of material from English, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and Swedish as well as substantial consideration of additional data from a wide range of languages including Basque, Cantonese, Chicheŵa, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Korean, Russian, Shanghai Chinese, Turkish and Xiamen Chinese. Although the example sentences are not made available for one to listen to (unlike for the Jun volume), this is hardly surprising, as most of them are gleaned from the publications of various researchers. Indeed, the collation of carefully-presented data from so many languages represents an admirable resource that research students will find both fascinating and useful.

One point of reference between the two books is the chapter in each dealing with the typological classification of languages. The Féry volume adopts a fairly traditional approach, as might be expected for a textbook, proposing four classes of languages: intonation languages with lexical stress such as English and German; pitch accent languages such as Swedish, Japanese and Turkish; tone languages such as Beijing Mandarin and Chicheŵa; and phrase languages in which prominence arises from boundary tones rather than lexical stress, including French and Hindi. In contrast, in the Jun volume, the final chapter on typology suggests language classification under three orthogonal parameters: prominence type (head, head/edge, or edge); word prosody (stress, tone, both, or none); and the innovative concept of macro-rhythm, involving the regularity of occurrence of high tones, with French having strong macro-rhythm, while English has medium macro-rhythm, and European Portuguese has weak macro-rhythm. While the analyses in the two books present different proposals for the classification of languages, they offer complementary perspectives that enhance our understanding of how languages can vary in their realisation of prosody.

One attractive feature of the Jun volume is that the editor has ensured that all contributions adhere to the same AM framework, which facilitates direct comparison between the prosody of the various languages. Nevertheless, it sometimes remains unclear whether differences in the analyses represent genuine contrasts between the languages or just the idiosyncratic choices of the analysts. For example, European Portuguese (as described by Sónia Frota) is analysed as having a phonological phrase, while Bengali (as described by Sameer ud Dowla Khan) has an accentual phrase (AP) but no phonological phrase. Does this represent a genuine difference between the two languages or not? The only chapter that includes an M% boundary tone is that for Jamaican Creole (as described by Shelome Gooden). Is there something special about Jamaican Creole that requires this M% boundary tone, or does it represent a phenomenon that might be handled in a different way by other analysts? And for dialects of Dutch (as described by Carlos Gussenhoven), we find reduplicated boundary tones such as H_ιH_ι (p. 349), but such reduplicated tones do not occur elsewhere. Is there something special about Dutch that requires this, or is it just an idiosyncracy of the analysis? I suspect the latter, as boundary tones such as L_ιH_ι are also found by the same analyst's treatment of the intonation of Ambonese Malay (Maskikit-Essed & Gussenhoven Reference Maskikit-Essed and Gussenhoven2016).

One other inconsistency found in the Jun volume might be mentioned: in their chapter on methodology, Sun-ah Jun & Janet Fletcher recommend that when one obtains data which includes the word ‘No’ as part of an answer in order to trigger contrastive focus, this ‘No’ should not be spoken out loud (p. 500); but the chapter on Georgian by Chad Vicenik & Sun-ah Jun does not follow this advice, as the word ‘No’ is included in some of the example sentences (e.g. on page 178), which is a little surprising as Sun-ah Jun was one of the authors for both chapters.

Being single-authored, the Féry volume does not have discrepancies arising from the work of different analysts. Nevertheless, there are some inconsistencies in the book. For example, it is stated in the glossary on page 318 that ‘[t]he principle of culminativity requires all content words to have a unique and obligatory stressed syllable’; but on page 222, it is stated that stress ‘can be culminative or obligatory or it can lack one or both these characteristics’. If the definition of culminativity involves obligatory stress, how can stress be culminative but not obligatory?

In addition, in some places the material in the Féry volume is unclear or confused. On page 23, it is suggested that the distances between formants are entire multiples of the f0, when of course it is harmonics, not formants, that are multiples of the f0; and then on page 171, it is stated that there is more variation in intonation than for vowels ‘due to the large individual variation in formant values as shaped by our articulatory organs’, which makes no sense as formant values determine vowel quality and do not affect intonation. Furthermore, throughout the book, there are rather a lot of complex terms and ideas about which previous knowledge is assumed, such as the concept of X^max being lexically governed (p. 71), a privative system of tones (p. 113), harmonically bounded elements in Optimality Theory (p. 123), unaccusative constructions (p. 147), and excrescent vowels (p. 182). Readers will need a substantial background in various disciplines of linguistics to be handle concepts such as these, and a brief explanation of them might have been useful. Finally, Meeussen's Rule is introduced on page 115 and then mention is made to Meussen's Rule (sic) on page 208, with no link backwards. It is a pity that this item is not in the index, to allow readers to quickly find the previous coverage.

Despite some issues such as these that add to the complexity of the material, the Féry volume offers an exceptionally valuable introduction to the intonation of languages which is illustrated with careful analysis of example sentences from an impressive array of data from various languages. As such it represents an excellent complement to the Jun volume with its detailed material on the intonation of 14 languages and its innovative classification of the typology of prosody, and many graduate students and researchers will find both books essential material when they attempt to describe the intonation of languages.