Pronouncing English: A stress-based approach with CD-ROM (review)

This introduction to the pronunciation of English deals in turn with metric feet, stress, intonation, spelling-to-pronunciation rules, vowels, consonants, and finally, connected speech processes. What makes it rather unusual is not just the presentation of stress and intonation before vowels and consonants, but also the extensive coverage of stress, on the grounds that the pronunciation of segments cannot be handled properly unless one knows which syllables are strong and which are weak. In fact, even the chapter on intonation allocates ten pages to a discussion of relative prominence in compound phrases.

The material on stress analyzes in some depth a wide range of factors such as word length, syllable weight, lexical category, prefixes, suffixes, and the origins of words that all contribute to determining English stress patterns, and many readers will find this comprehensive coverage both fascinating and valuable. One suspects, however, that some foreign learners might struggle with so much detail, and furthermore one wonders how many nonnative speakers could make any realistic attempt at guessing the stress on such imaginary words as frumplusciousness and predepressionicity (31) or care very much about stress patterns on gerrymandering and lesbianism (55) when the basic vowels and consonants have not yet been introduced.

The initial chapter on metric feet might similarly pose a few problems, as both iambic and trochaic feet are introduced with no indication of how to decide between the two. For example, if a line of poetry has alternating strong and weak syllables with a weak syllable both at the start and end, is this iambic rhythm with an extrametrical final syllable, or is it trochaic rhythm with an additional weak syllable at the start? A similar problem exists for anapestic and dactylic meter, with the same poem being used to illustrate both (9). Does the meter really alternate in this poem?

One other unusual aspect of this book is the fact that detailed rules are presented for orthography-to-pronunciation before vowels and consonants have been introduced. While there is much to applaud in this approach, as the apparent chaos of English spelling does indeed have considerable regularity that can be exploited, it is also true that the rules get rather complicated. For example, although the seven rules for the pronunciation of <k> (110–11) are certainly comprehensive, some readers might find them rather daunting.

The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM with recordings, to illustrate such things as meter and intonation, and also a textual corpus of all the entries from a dictionary. While this corpus offers an excellent resource for in-depth additional research, it may appeal only to the more ambitious students, and perhaps this summarizes the book: while it is packed with comprehensive details on stress placement and spelling rules that many will find both interesting and useful, others might find the wealth of detail in these areas a bit overwhelming.