The Phonology of English: A Prosodic Optimality-Theoretic Approach (review)

Providing the first full treatment of English prosody within optimality theory (OT), this book is clearly a welcome addition to the rapidly growing literature on constraint-based phonology. Defining the prosody of English as the allowable configurations of consonants, vowels, and phonetic prominence (vii), Hammond’s main goal is to express phonological generalizations about syllables, stress, and foot structure through the ranking and interaction of constraints.

Like other volumes in this series, this one focuses on the phonology of just one language without assuming any prior knowledge of it. Hence, Ch. 1 (1–30) offers a brief characterization of the sounds of English based on a description of the oppositions between English consonants and vowels from an articulatory perspective. This is followed by a simplified, but nonetheless effective overview of the OT framework which defines basic optimality concepts (e.g. candidate set, optimal candidate, constraint ranking) and provides a constraint-based treatment of familiar phonological phenomena such as vowel nasalization and aspiration. The remaining chapters of the book focus on syllables and feet as ‘the organizing principles of English phonology’. Each chapter provides a wealth of examples drawn from computer databases of English. H explains his decision to use computerized lexicons as a means of allowing for a more systematic and unbiased examination of the language.

The theory of syllabification presented in Ch. 2 (31–47) adopts the standard view that syllables may vary with respect to their number of moras. English syllables, for example, can have zero, one, two, or three moras; however, the fact that English words have to be minimally bimoraic prevents monomoraic syllables from constituting words on their own. Ch. 3 (48–104) offers an extended treatment of the combination of consonants with subsections on word onsets, word-final clusters, and medial clusters. To account for the effect of the sonority hierarchy on co-occurrence restrictions, H adopts an OT perspective by formalizing the hierarchy via the syntactic combination of constraints and derived ranking. Ch. 4 (105–48) looks at the distribution of vowels and diphthongs. Generalizations about what can count as the peak of a syllable are captured by constraint schemata such as *peak/X, *onset/X, and *coda/X.

After clarifying the distinction between stress, accent, and metrical feet in Ch. 5 (149–91), H proposes a general theory of the foot, based on the work of Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky, which introduces the familiar parse-σ, foot binarity, and nonfinality constraints. The overall correspondence between stress patterns and syllable structure is dealt with in Ch. 6 (192–247), whereas Ch. 7 (248–83) examines the distribution of the rightmost stress with respect to monomorphemic words. All theoretical proposals are, in fact, made on the basis of morphologically simple words, as H makes clear in his preface (vii–viii). Despite his insistence, in Ch. 8, ‘Other stresses’ (284–330), H extends his analysis to polymorphemic data and shows that certain affixes do allow stress to occur outside the three-syllable window. To capture the exceptionality of ‘preantepenultimate’ stress, H formulates a neutrality constraint preventing those affixes from being part of the prosodic word.

To sum up, The phonology of English provides a clear introduction to a whole new approach to phonology which goes back only to the mid-1990s. The numerous constraints and OT tableaux are carefully explained throughout the chapters, making this volume the ideal tool for upper-level undergraduates or beginning graduates.