A Practical Introduction to Phonetics (review)

This is truly a remarkable book. I first became acquainted with it in its first edition (1988) when I made the wise decision to use it for my graduate course, Linguistic Phonetics. It made the task of teaching articulatory and auditory phonetics so much more efficient. In those days, up to my retirement, such training was required for all students in our program in experimental phonetics; it was also a prerequisite, along with courses in phonology and syntax, for anyone taking Field Methods in Linguistics. The second edition is in a larger format with additions and corrections as well as an updated list of readings. I myself was brought up on such earlier works as those by Henry Sweet (1877), M. Grammont (1930), Otto Jespersen (1933), Kenneth L. Pike (1943), R. M. S. Heffner (1952), and Daniel Jones (1956). Such later general works as Abercrombie 1967, Ladefoged 1971, 1975, and Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996 were important additional sources for my students. All of the foregoing and others not mentioned still merit attention, but the book under review has new virtues. It is, I think, the most innovative in its gripping way of making the student cognizant of his or her vocal tract and its control.

J. C. Catford is a product of the traditional European or, more narrowly, British school of phonetics, which demands hours and hours of mimicry and drill. This approach is rarely found in North American departments of linguistics and departments of speech and hearing. It seems to me that this book is especially appropriate for teachers of phonetics who themselves are not the product of such intensive training. Such a plausible claim, by the way, is made neither by the author nor, in its blurb on the back cover, by the publisher.

The reader might well wonder why the word ‘practical’ appears in the title of the book. After all, no matter how much attention is given to theories of the production and perception of speech between its covers, any phonetics book is bound to present rather detailed accounts of practical matters. In his ‘Preface’ (v) the author remarks, ‘the title of this book is, designedly, “A Practical Introduction to Phonetics” and not “An Introduction to Practical Phonetics”, for it is, indeed, an introduction to general, or theoretical, phonetics, though it proceeds towards that goal in a highly practical way’. He goes on to say, ‘Readers are introduced to the phonetic classification of the sounds of speech by means of a series of simple introspective experiments carried out inside their own vocal tracts . . .’. The phonetic transcription used is, advisedly, the current one of the International Phonetic Association (1999) although, here and there, the author proposes a symbol for a speech sound not mentioned by the IPA. C does not provide recordings of speech with the book lest students depend too much on imitation rather than mastering the articulation. For those who crave such recordings, however, he mentions the set made by John Wells for the IPA.

Throughout the book we find cleverly designed exercises following each description of a phonetic category. Although I have minor reservations here and there, the descriptions and explanations are lucid and authoritative. The chapter headings indicate the organization of the book: Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’; Ch. 2, ‘Basic components of speech’; Ch. 3, ‘Phonation: A third basic component’; Ch. 4, ‘Articulation: Stricture types’; Ch. 5, ‘Articulation: Locations’; Ch. 6, ‘Co-articulation and sequences’; Ch. 7, ‘Vowels: Introduction’; Ch. 8, ‘The cardinal vowels (CVs)’; Ch. 9, ‘Prosodic features’; Ch. 10, ‘Sound-systems of languages’; Ch. 11, ‘Review’.

Each chapter is divided into important subtopics. For example, Ch. 2 (basic components) includes initiation and articulation, fricative and stop articulation, pulmonic pressure and suction initiation, glottalic initiation, velaric initiation, review of initiation types, and initiator velocity and initiator power (stress). Fifty-three figures and twelve tables are very helpful illustrations of points in the explanations and exercises.

To this day, for many a phonologist...