Sound Patterns of Spoken English (review)

‘This book is about the differences from citation form pronunciation which occur in conversational English and their perceptual consequences’ (13). Thus stated, the aim of Linda Shockey’s book is already implicit in the title, which apparently alludes to The sound pattern of English (SPE, Chomsky & Halle 1968). In contrast to SPE, the author wants to account for spontaneous ‘unscripted’ language and its variability. However, she does not intend to complement SPE by dealing with mere performance (phonetics or low-level phonology), since she assigns the patterns of ‘normal pronunciation’ (1) she describes to ‘the competence of the native speaker’ (13). Hence she covers the area of selected pronunciations (and their perception) between citation forms, defined as ‘the most formal pronunciation by a particular person’ (2), and normal pronunciations, although she often includes still more casual forms as well.

As suggested by its title, the first chapter ‘Setting the stage’ brings up the most relevant issues, such as the phonetics-phonology continuum, casual vs. fast speech, and the universal vs. language-specific nature of differences from citation forms that she calls reductions. However, this is done without any in-depth discussion. For instance, she fails to discuss the exact relationship between underlying and citation forms (2). This may be justified as being outside the main scope of the book, as well as having been thoroughly pursued by SPE and other phonological models. However, not even mentioning hyperlento forms (as the opposite pole to the most reduced forms) is a serious lacuna, because they constitute prima facie evidence against citation forms as her input to the reduction processes leading to the unscripted pronunciation forms.

These reduction processes are the subject of the second chapter. First, S provides a list of factors influencing the degree of casual speech reduction. Next, she selects the conditioning factors of stress and syllable structure as criteria for surveying major processes in a number of varieties of British and American English in particular. Although it is an informative and large chapter, it lacks sufficient systematicity, reflected in this surprising statement: ‘The impression that formal speech is less phonologically reduced than casual speech is probably based on the fact that much of (if not most) formal speech is scripted rather than spontaneous’ (17). First, this claim is not supported by any evidence or reference. Second, the quoted ‘impression’ has been substantiated by empirical work on the phonostylistics of many languages (since Labov 1972). The same holds for her criticism of the relevance of degree of attention (77).

Ch. 3, ‘Attempts at phonological explanation’, boils down to a history of research starting with Harris 1969 through early natural phonology and several other approaches, among which the author seems to favor optimality theory, up to trace/event theory, which she singles out as relevant for the new millennium. This is a useful, albeit noncommittal, survey of work on conversational phonology, but it is not without misrepresentations, such as in the attribution to natural phonology and optimality theory of the principle ‘the more common a phonological process is, the more powerful’ (61). Informativity is also reduced by the frequent lack of references, for example, in her summary on interactions of ‘conditioning factors for phonological reduction’ (71).

The second largest chapter (Ch. 4) is on ‘Experimental studies of casual speech’, a field to which the author has contributed substantially since her thesis of 1973 (Shockey 1973). Accordingly, her own research is well represented in the two subchapters on production and on perception. Although much progress has been made since the early studies based on impressionistic transcription, she rightly concludes that ‘the study of casual speech pronunciation is underrepresented in the literature’ and that ‘up-to-date descriptions of non-standard varieties are extremely rare’ (109). Regrettably, the proposed methodologies of research are not well documented and supported with displays of data analysis. Even S herself does not provide enough evidence of experimental analysis for some of her unexpected and unpredicted transcriptions of putative...