The phonology of modern English By Wiktor Jassem (review)

BOOK NOTICES 987 titious listings at the end of each article. [Margaret E. Winters (Epro), Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.] Dialectologie et littérature du domaine d'oïl occidentale: Actes du colloque tenu à l'Université de Caen en février 1981. Ed. by René Lepelley. (Cahier des annales de Normandie, 15.) Caen, 1983. Pp. 264. F 45.00. The 1980 Congrès de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes at Majorca, attended by dialectologists from western France and Québec who were interested in comparing their data and problems, resulted in this colloquium. Despite the title, only one contribution—an outline for collecting texts—treats regional literature. The remaining eighteen deal with phonetic, lexical, and other linguistic questions in both the local dialects and the regional French. At the phonetic level, for Normandy, F. Carton examines suprasegmental features in patois and regional French samples, finding some which are characteristically Norman, but none that is specifically so. J. Devarrieux examines regional interference on the orthography offinal IEI in Basse-Normandie, but omits any data from Paris that might lend perspective and suggest sound conclusions. J. P. Chauveau convincingly circumscribes the phonetic environments of a diphthongization (« > œu ~ au) previously considered recent and 'spontaneous' in Haute-Bretagne; less decisive is S. Jouin's orthographically motivated look at isoglosses in Brittany's Gallo region. P. Gauthier provides a systematic historical study of the non-nasal vowels of Bas-Poitou, with an eye to the larger western French context and to the Occitan traits which distinguish Bas- from Haut-Poitevin. Wider attention will go to studies by Henriette Walter and Anne-Marie Houdebine. Charting the results of a phonological survey of 300 schoolchildren from various regions of France. Houdebine has devised a means of schematicizing vocalic 'tendencies' in cases of apparent change-in-progress: e.g., she can specify that, while the 'tension' capable of manifesting the 'lost' /a/ ~ IqJ distinction is present in the Midi, it is less strong there than in Paris or the western region. Walter, who has devoted much work to sorting out the elusive Id ~ Id question, here presents a brief but intriguing note on an area of the Mauges (Maine et Loire) where the regional French adds an additional phoneme to the morass: I'd, 'une voyelle centrale, très brève, plutôt tendue et surtout non arrondie' (257). The complete loss of this vowel from the younger generation's speech is attributed to the influx of the standard, a factor which has complicated the issue even among the oldest speakers. Nevertheless , she manages to reconstruct an earlier system which maintained four distinctions consistently : Idfumée, fumez; I'dfumer, fumé, fumait ; Id fumais, fumaient; /0/fumeux. In the lexical domain, nine articles treat agricultural topics, principally dairy farming. Those by P. Boissel (Normandy), B. Horiot (W. France), P. Rezeau (W. France), J. C. Rivière (Haute-Bretagne), and M. Valiere & C. Robert (Poitou) are additionally useful for their bibliographies ; and Boissel provides transcriptions of four short dialect texts. The other contributors are P. Bouchard (eastern Pays de Caux), Cl. Bourel (Haute-Bretagne), G. Dulong (Québec ), and H. Tomlinson (Guernsey). Finally, J. B. Marcellesi & G. Lozay analyse the results of their somewhat facile survey of dialect awareness and competence among students at the Université de Haute-Normandie; and H. Goebel delivers a promising report (and a good bibliography) on the application of dialectometric technology to the ALF; essentially, it permits the drawing of unambiguous dialect boundaries based on however many of 2577 'taxats' one selects. The book is easily worth its modest price, even if only a third of the articles seem potentially important. Through the pages comes that scent of nostalgia, decay, and regret familiar to Romance dialectologists, who appreciate the irrevocable loss suffered with the death of every upper-generation paysan. [John Joseph, Oklahoma State University.] The phonology of modern English. By Wiktor Jassem. Warszawa: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1983. Pp. 768. Zl. 180.00. J intends his book as an introductory course in the phonetics and phonology of Standard English for university students who are not majoring in linguistics and have had no previous contact with the field; it may also be used for English majors in non-English-speaking...