The sounds of the world's languages By Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson (review)

374LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) This book points the way to this success by showing in microcosm (if such a term can be used of a single volume of this length) the directions the theory was already taking and the enthusiasm of those drawn to it as early as 1991. REFERENCES Goldberg, Adele E. 1996. Constructions. A construction grammar approach to argument structure. (Cognitive theory of language and culture.) Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. -----, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago & New York: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar, Vol. 1 . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lindner, Susan. 1982. What goes up doesn't necessarily come down: The ins and outs of opposites. Chicago Linguistic Society 18.305-23. Sweetser, Eve E. 1990. From etymology to pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Academic Affairs Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL 62901-4305 [mewl@siu.edu] The sounds of the world's languages. By Peter Ladefoged and Ian Maddieson. Oxford Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. xxi, 426. Paper $31.95. Reviewed by Geoffrey S. Nathan, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale This book truly lives up to its name—it is a catalog, probably pretty close to complete, of all the sounds known to occur in all the languages of the world. There is, of course, a possibility, recognized by the authors, that lurking around the next corner will be a sound that will fill in a gap in the IPA chart. Certainly the recent discovery of the linguolabial stops in Vao (18-19, with stills from videotapes) indicates that there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in the first edition of Ladefoged's basic textbook. However, with the increasing knowledge we now have of cultures previously unknown to western science, the chances of this book needing radical revision in the near future are quite small. The book is based on the database of sounds assembled at UCLA and known as the UCLA Phonetic Segment Inventory Database (UPSID) plus the accumulated knowledge of the authors and the phonetics laboratory at UCLA. Since this book is a description of the possibilities of human speech sounds it does not take major theoretical stances on many current phonological as opposed to strictly phonetic issues, such as binary vs. unary features, nor does it provide definitive answers to some of the vexing questions of feature geometry, such as how many place nodes there are or whether other types of features should be gathered into nodes, although there are some suggestions for the issue of overarching place features. The book is organized around the traditional phonetic categories—places of articulation, stops, nasals, fricatives, laterals, rhotics, clicks, vowels, and multiple articulatory gestures (double closures and secondary articulations). Each chapter contains a description of all the possibilities known to occur in the database. While the description is primarily framed in traditional articulatory phonetic terms, there is considerable reliance as well on acoustic data (a random flip through the book reveals lots of spectrograms and small bits of waveforms). There is also a considerable number ofpalatograms and representations derived from other, more exotic measurement systems (oral and pharyngeal pressure, lip position, x-rays, and videotapes). It is difficult to know how to proceed in reviewing this book—an instant standard reference work that belongs on the desk of every linguist who has an interest in what sounds human languages make use of. Although in most instances the book does not take strong stands on REVIEWS375 controversial theoretical issues, the authors state explicitly that they have been influenced by geometric phonology (see, for example, McCarthy 1988). Consequently, they divide the total set of possible points of articulation into five major zones: labial, coronal, dorsal, radical, and laryngeal. These zones subsume a total of seventeen possibilities, and in one grand chart (40-41) the authors summarize all possible sets of contrasts that they have been able to find among the 289 possibilities. From this chart and from arguments made, for example, by Halle (1983) and Sagey (1990), they observe...