At first glance, this appears to be like any other introductory book on phonetics: it has all the usual chapters and illustrations. A closer look shows significant differences, among them an insistence upon using normal conversational speech as a model rather than citation forms and, despite inclusion of all the usual information about speech at the level of the segment, a focus on nonsegmental phenomena.
In the preface, Ken Lodge lists his basic premises: everyday speech is the true reflection of a linguistic system, speech is not a concatenation of segments, universal characteristics of the phonetics of a linguistic system are poorly understood, and ear-training, production and acoustics should be taught in equal measure.
Enlarging on his third point, the author asserts that the connection between a phonetic and a phonological analysis of a language is not as obvious as most linguists think: ‘[t]his book . . . tries to avoid presenting the phonetics in such a way as to make mainstream phonology look obvious’ (p. x). By this he seems to mean that phonetics is best looked at as a set of gestures which can take up varying amounts of time and are not necessarily timed to begin and end simultaneously with segment boundaries, while phonology tends to divide speech into segmental units. In this, he echoes Firthian sentiments (e.g. Firth 1948), though not overtly (Firth is not mentioned in his bibliography), and the ideas of subsequent nonsegmentally-oriented authors too numerous to mention here. This is not to say that Lodge has not arrived at these opinions independently.
In his first chapter, he discusses the differences between speech and writing, suggesting that a bias towards seeing speech as a series of segments is related to the way we write and that only a minimum amount of information about suprasegmental aspects of language are represented in an alphabetic system. In this chapter, he also defines segmental phonology and suggests readings.
Chapter 2 outlines speech articulation, with many helpful sagittal diagrams. Chapter 3 is titled ‘The articulators in combination’ and points out that our traditional transcription system allows some combinations (such as voiceless fricatives) to be described relatively easily, whereas other common articulatory combinations (such as frication with attendant creak leading to glottal closure) are not at all easy to represent. He suggests that parametric representations are one way forward.
Chapter 4 deals with transcription of various accents of English as well as of French, German, Modern Greek, and Malay. Chapters 4 and 5 expand on the notion that articulation can have longer and shorter components within a linguistic unit and that these often do not correspond nicely to the phonological segment. He uses the term ‘long-domain features’ in approximately the same way as Harris (1944) used ‘long component’, and again evokes a Firthian approach. Chapter 6 introduces prosodic features, again not generally linkable to phonological segments. The timing variations discussed in Chapter 7 are examples of features which do not belong to segments or even syllables.
Otherwise, Chapter 7, perhaps the most singular of the chapters, covers continuous speech phenomena, first examining in great detail the stages that the articulators pass through in producing a short utterance, then outlining some of the expected divergences from citation form in unselfconsciously-produced English and other languages. Chapter 8 looks at varieties of English not covered in Chapter 4 (from Scotland, East Anglia, Jamaica, Kenya), and Chapter 9 deals with acoustic phonetics. Following is a glossary of phonetic terms.
This is a book which repays the attention of the intermediate or advanced student of phonetics who enjoys pondering the complexities in the analysis of sound and sound systems. It will be an eye-opener for those who have not considered the medium and long-term effects produced by articulators of different sizes and shapes moving at different speeds and with different constraints while producing a so-called string of speech sounds.
