English Sound Structure

On Fri, 25 Feb 2000, And Rosta wrote:

> It's six years since I last taught more than phonemes-of-English phonology,
> so I'm not up to date with recent textbooks. I can't remember what textbooks
> I used, but I do remember that I was planning to use John Harris's _English
> sound structure_, which was published just as the course was finishing,
> the next time I taught it. But then I changed jobs. In my current department
> we don't do proper phonology, because it's in a jurisdictional no-man's-land
> (between me, the Formal Person, and someone else (a prosodist/phonetician),
> the Sounds Person). I might be biased in favour of the John Harris book,
> because he taught me (very enjoyably) as an undergrad, but the stuff in the book
> was all developed after my undergrad years.
I think that Harris' book is a fine example of balancing
theoretical concerns with real language data. It was a required
text for a course I took from Mike Hammond on English Phonology
(along with Giegerich's _English Phonology: An Introduction_ and
Chomsky and Halle's _The Sound Pattern of English_; Mike's book
was still in the scattered analyses stage). The theoretical
orientation is generative, but uses Government Phonology rather
than more familiar work based on distinctive features.

Dirk

--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu