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

Anthony Fox’s erudite cross-linguistic study of the major nonsegmental phonological features of speech will be readily accessible to a broad linguistic readership. Three aspects of the author’s presentation make this book particularly valuable. First, the narrative focus remains squarely on the observable variety of language data, with the various theories that have been developed to account for prosodic features serving as background to the primary discussion. In this way, this book is a useful companion to such works as Phonology in generative grammar (Michael Kenstowicz, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994) and Autosegmental and metrical phonology (John A. Goldsmith, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), both of which are concerned primarily with explicating the various competing theoretical frameworks themselves. Second, although F treats each prosodic feature separately, with individual chapters devoted to length, accent, tone, and intonation, he continually revisits the issue of their mutual interaction to investigate prosody as a functional system rather than simply as a set of phonetic traits. Finally, the book deals with the comparative structure of prosodic systems from the vantage point of language typology and includes many insightful comments on the types of interactions between suprasegmental features observable across languages.

The book contains six chapters, a bibliography (366–96), general index (397–99), and an index of the 125 or so language forms that furnished the data for the discussion (400–401). Ch. 1 (1–11), the introduction, attempts to define the phonetic and phonological bases that distinguish prosodic from nonprosodic features. Many major theoretical frameworks, both past and current, are evoked, especially nonlinear approaches. But some notable ones are virtually ignored, e.g. lexical phonology and optimality theory, which F omits because their value for understanding prosody ‘is as yet uncertain’ (v). Successive chapters deal with the major prosodic components: length (Ch. 2), accent (Ch. 3), tone (Ch. 4), and intonation (Ch. 5). The final chapter, entitled ‘Prosodic structure’, contains the book’s brief and only treatment of the issue of prosodic domains and summarizes the author’s general conclusions without positing any unified theoretical framework to explain them. In his own words, F does not attempt ‘to present a fully articulated theory, still less a formal model, but rather a general view of prosodic organization which reflects the conviction that this organization is not the mere co-occurence and co-incidence of independent features, but rather constitutes an integrated whole: a structure’ (v–vi). F succeeds in demonstrating the crucial interdependence of the features he describes. For example, he gives the following fine-grained categorization of the types of accent-tone interactions found across languages (264): nonaccentual tone languages (Cantonese, Hausa), accentual tone languages (Mandarin, Zulu), tonal accent languages (Swedish, Serbo-Croatian), pitch-accent languages (Japanese), stress-accent languages (English, Spanish), and nonaccentual languages (French). In tonal accent languages such as Swedish, the tonal system is dependent on the stressed syllables, which is not true of accentual tone languages such as Mandarin. F additionally concludes that, in marked contrast to accent, ‘tone reflects prosodic structure, but does not determine it’ (267).

Well-organized and written in a clear, engaging style, this book succeeds in presenting a comprehensive survey of the key approaches to prosody. It significantly advances current knowledge of the nature and role of prosodic systems across languages.