Prosodic Features and Prosodic Structure: The Phonology of Suprasegmentals (Oxford Linguistics)

Rather than organizing the book according to chronology or school, as Durand does in his "Generative and Non-linear phonology", Fox introduces prosodic features -- length, accent, tone and intonation -- one at a time. These headings, sandwiched between an introduction and a concluding chapter entitled "Prosodic Structure", form the chapters of the book. As an example of the book's thoroughness, the chapter on length consists of approximately 100 pages, with section headings including among others "The Paradigmatic Interpretation of Length", "The Syntagmatic Interpretation of Length", "Length and the Syllable", "The Non-linear Approach to Length", "Length as a Prosodic Feature", and "Length and Prosodic Structure". These in turn are divided into numerous headings and subheadings.

The quality of the prose is high throughout, making even complex argumentation accessible to undergraduates or even possibly the general reader. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of information may be sufficient to turn off the non-specialised reader. Professional phonologists, on the other hand, may, on leafing through the index, be disappointed to see only two brief references to prosodic phonology and none to harmonic phonology, government phonology or declarative phonology, for instance. Optimality Theory earns only a couple of paragraphs towards the end of the book. Fox gives two reasons for this: that he is concerned with "the nature of [prosodic] stru