Assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, this book offers a thorough account of topics covered in courses in phonetics and phonology. It is unusually comprehensive, including detailed attention to the fundamentals of speech production as well as to phonological description and analysis.
The early chapters describe the organs of speech, survey the wide variety of speech sounds that can be found in the world’s languages, and explain basic principles of phonological organisation. A separate chapter is devoted to the generative approach to phonology, and another to the acoustics of speech production, providing information that will prove valuable reference material.
The phenomena of stress, tone and intonation are dealt with in a chapter on prosody, and several descriptive systems of speech components or features are also summarised and reviewed. The final chapter draws the book together by looking back over the theoretical issues that have been raised and by giving a historical survey of ways of thinking and talking about speech.