Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure: The Phonology of Suprasegmentals (review)

Drawing from an impressive array of sources, this comprehensive book focuses on the understanding of length, accent, tone, and intonation as major prosodic features. Written for linguists with a background in phonology, each chapter includes phonetic and phonological perspectives, examining both paradigmatic and syntagmatic theories and presenting potential distinctive features. Fox adopts a historical approach to prosody throughout, beginning with the early Greeks and including findings from the past decade, although he draws most heavily from the Prague school and the American structuralists. The stated goal is to provide an understanding of prosodic structure by showing the importance of early contributions to current research.

The chapter devoted to length includes the viewpoints proposed by the Prague school and the American structuralists and considers the role of the mora from several perspectives. F discusses two nonlinear approaches to length, combining metrical and auto-segmental theories. In his critique of Kenneth Pike’s categorization of stress-timed and syllable-timed languages, F points out that there is no evidence for evenly timed stress nor does he see evidence for syllable-timed languages. This chapter would benefit from additional justification for unexplained assumptions that are made as well as from corrections of typographical and other errors.

The following chapter on accent defines past and present meanings of the term ‘accent’ and introduces dynamic stress-accent and melodic pitch-accent as the basic accent types. The primary approaches covered include the Prague school’s functional approach, the American structuralists’ distributional theories, and various pedagogical premises. An exploration of the representations of accent developed by Mark Liberman, Alan Prince, Elisabeth Selkirk, and Bruce Hayes evaluates the use of grids and trees. The chapter on tone includes comparisons of downstep and downdrift, attempts by several theorists to assign binary features to tone, and discussions of the role of register and of the function of tone bearing units. Fox highlights the contributions of Kenneth Pike, John Goldsmith, Larry Hyman, and Moira Yip, among others.

The intonation chapter is perhaps the most insightful. Evaluations of several theories focusing on pitch levels vs. pitch contours reveal an advantage to contour approaches, as these may be grouped by shape. The chapter gives an excellent overview of the work of Janet Pierrehumbert and of the author. In Pierrehumbert’s work, English intonation patterns are represented by pitch accents, a phrase tone, and a boundary tone. F cites his own previous work in describing a typology including envelope, prominence, and modality features.

The book concludes by combining the discussion of length, accent, tone, and intonation in a detailed critique of proposed hierarchies of prosodic structure. Three types of specifications emerge as the various analyses presented throughout the book are classified as bottom-up, top-down, or left-to-right. In this ambitious work, F displays a profound knowledge of the history of prosodic studies and a remarkable ability to sift through this legacy, highlighting those sometimes forgotten revelations which deserve to be remembered and reconsidered.