Variation and gradience in phonetics and phonology (review)

Variation and gradience in phonetics and phonology is volume 14 of the ‘Phonology and phonetics’ series edited by Aditi Lahiri. The general aim of this series is to stabilize and strengthen the relationship between phonetics and phonology, and many previous volumes do this admirably, most notably, the Laboratory phonology volumes of recent years. This volume (a collection of papers, some of which were delivered at the 2004 conference on Variation and Change in Phonology and Phonetics in Potsdam, Germany) unfortunately does not uniformly succeed in this task. While it includes several strong papers on the phonetics and phonology of variation, some contributions are weak in their treatment of phonetics, and a few hardly address variation or gradience at all. Other less substantial factors detract from the volume’s coherence and readability. The book is poorly edited, with typographic and grammatical errors, unfilled pages due to formatting problems, a paltry index, and very little thematic continuity among the papers.

The book begins with an introduction by the editors, followed by fifteen additional chapters (each with its own list of references), a list of authors, and an index. The chapters are not numbered, and though the introductory chapter states that the book is split into three parts (the first part dealing with ‘variation at the subsegmental level’, the second with ‘variation between the segment and the phrase [sic]’, and the third with ‘variation of the phrase’ (4)), this is not indicated in the table of contents nor in the body of the book itself.

The editors’ ‘Introduction to variation and gradience in phonetics and phonology’ sets the tone for many of the chapters that follow, with imprecise statements about variation, little discussion of gradience, and a fairly parochial view of phonology. On the first page we read that ‘There is variation at every level of phonological representation’ (1). What do the editors mean by this? What are the levels of phonological representation being referred to, and what kind of variation is clearly demonstrated by linguistic data at each of these levels? Though ‘gradience’ appears in the title of the volume, it is not defined explicitly or discussed in any depth in the introduction. This omission could be related to the optimality-theoretic (OT) approach adopted. Although OT has been expanding its inventory of constraint types, ordering relations, and notions of the lexicon to accommodate variation since Anttila’s (1997) proposal for stratified grammars, most of these treatments deal with (lexical) candidates whose composition includes standard phonological features, segments, and prosodic constituents and boundaries. Gradient properties, such as the degree of devoicing of a final voiced stop (which may be neither fully voiced nor fully voiceless), the duration of glottal closure or creak between two vowels (which may range from barely visible to short to medium to long), or the degree of lenition of an oral stop (which may span the gamut from stop to fricative to glide to zero), are typically not handled in these models. Whereas OT may have little, at present, to say about gradience, some cases of variation are handled by expanding the lexicon to include two or more phonological variants of the same word (Chs. 8, 10, and 13). In this context, it is surprising that the introduction fails to mention, even in passing, the many researchers of variation and gradience in phonetics and phonology who have adopted exemplar-based approaches (e.g. Johnson 1997, Bybee 2001, Pierrehumbert 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006, and papers in Gahl & Yu 2006).

The first part of the book includes six chapters on ‘variation at the segmental or subsegmental level’ (4): ‘Accepting unlawful variation and unnatural classes’, by Jeff Mielke; ‘Phonetic variation and gestural specification: Production of Russian consonants’, by Alexei Kochetov; ‘Variation in the perception of an L2 contrast: A combined phonetic and phonological account’, by Silke Hamann; ‘Prosodic conditioning, vowel dynamics and sound change’, by...