Many theories of intonational phonology have granted some special status to pitch features that occur at the edges of prosodic domains, contrasting them with prominence-lending pitch configurations. The standard American structuralist theory that flourished in the 1950s (Trager & Smith 1951) drew a clear distinction between PITCH PHONEMES and JUNCTURE PHONEMES, the former constituting the body of a contour and the latter describing the movements at the contour’s end. Parallel to this development, a distinction was also drawn within the Prague School between the cumulative and delimitative functions of tonal phenomena (Trubetzkoy 1958), the former including prominence, the latter domainedge marking. Bolinger (especially 1970) distinguished ‘accent’ from ‘intonation’: ACCENT referred to the distinctive pitch shapes that accompany prominent stressed syllables (now generally known, following Bolinger, as pitch accents), while INTONATION included, among other things, distinctive pitch movements at the ends of contours. A distinction very similar, but not identical, to Bolinger’s is made in the theory of intonation developed at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in the Netherlands (Cohen & ’t Hart 1967, ’t Hart et al. 1990), namely between PROMINENCE-LENDING and NON-PROMINENCE-LENDING pitch movements.

Many phonological phenomena require reference to information beyond the immediate context of segments and boundaries. Most commonly, the syllable has been employed as an additional phonological context, but determining the exact nature of syllables and their boundaries has proved notoriously difficult. One approach is to add resyllabification (Selkirk 1982, Borowsky 1986) or ambisyllabification (Kahn 1976, Gussenhoven 1986, Rubach 1996) to basic syllabification in an attempt to account for phenomena where syllabification alone is inadequate. In this paper we argue against this approach and argue for a second approach, the PROSODIC approach. The essence of the prosodic approach is that there is a HIERARCHY of prosodic categories, of which the syllable is one, any one of which can serve as the context for phonological rules. Essentially, the argument is that prosodic categories, independently required for a wide variety of phonological processes, are sufficient for accounting for all the phenomena that resyllabification or ambisyllabification have been used for, whereas the reverse is not true. Resyllabification and ambisyllabification are invoked ad hoc for certain phenomena and cannot account adequately for the full range of processes that can be understood in terms of prosodic categories. Resyllabification and ambisyllabification are therefore superfluous and can be dispensed with, indeed must be dispensed with, in an explanatory theory of phonology.

The principles determining secondary stress placement in English display considerable non-uniformity (Prince 1993) in their application. While in some contexts a syllable will be stressed if it is heavy, or if it is stressed in the stem of a derived form, in other environments syllable weight and stem stress do not entail secondary stress. To take a relatively straightforward case, the primary stress of the stems in (1a) is preserved as a secondary stress in the derived forms (cf. monomorphemic T`tamagóuchi with initial stress), but stress preservation systematically fails in words like (1b). Here we have phonologically conditioned non-uniformity; stress preservation on light syllables is blocked in the environment of a following primary stress.

Roca & Johnson (R & J) are ambitious in their goals for A course in phonology (CP), now in its second printing.I would like to thank Dirk Elzinga and Sharon Hargus for helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this review. I would also like to thank Iggy Roca for his thorough commentary on that earlier draft, although I realise that he will likely remain unsatisfied with the present version. The book, intended for beginners (p. xv), covers what the authors see as the outcome of 30 years of work in mainstream generative phonology, including the framework of Optimality Theory (OT), and strives to do so in a pedagogically sound fashion. CP contains 20 chapters, divided into three parts: Phonetics and phonology, Suprasegmental structure and Advanced theory. There is, in addition, an accompanying workbook by the same authors and publisher, A workbook in phonology (WP) (pp. x+144), which is designed to be employable with other textbooks or on its own.

Understanding phonology is intended as an introductory textbook in phonology for students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics.The book served as the main text in both an introductory course to phonology for graduate students in linguistics as well as one for undergraduates at Ohio State University. Input from students in these classes regarding aspects of the book contributed to our evaluation in this review. We are particularly grateful to the following students for their helpful comments: Sharonne Albicker, Ryan Ginstrom, Jette Hansen, Sun-Hee Lee, Mary Paster, Shravan Vasishth, Jinyi Wang and Peggy Wong. We would also like to thank Carlos Gussenhoven, Sharon Hargus, Robert Levine and David Odden for valuable comments on a draft version of this review. The goal of the text, as stated, is to provide an introduction to all major topics in phonology, and a comprehensive survey of phonological theory. The book aims to explain the basics of phonology, rather than arguing for a particular theoretical position, thereby giving students a sound understanding of the field.

These days, most graduate students in linguistics in the United States are not regularly exposed to the theory of Lexical Phonology and Morphology (Kiparsky 1982, Mohanan 1986). This theory – and the issues we wrestled with in it – have been largely discarded from the curriculum, replaced by the technical questions and concerns of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993, McCarthy & Prince 1993). Questions of stratal assignment, the Strict Cycle Condition and the like have been largely abandoned in favour of the minutiae of correspondence (McCarthy & Prince 1995) and sympathy (McCarthy 1999).

As stated in its Foreword, the Handbook is a ‘user’s manual’ for the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It provides a variety of information about the philosophy and practice of IPA usage and in so doing, confronts a number of current issues in phonetics. But the goal of the Handbook remains resolutely practical, the intention being to give just ‘the information needed for getting to grips with the IPA’ (p. viii). Nonetheless, it provides much more information and discussion about transcription than the previous official source of information about the IPA, the 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association. The decision to produce a new Handbook was made at the 1989 Kiel Convention of the International Phonetic Association.