Preliminaries to linguistic phonetics

This book is of great interest to linguists for two major reasons: it is a well organized collection of phonetic observations which contrast speech sounds in many languages, and it also includes an attempt to put these observations into the service of phonology. The observations are presented in the eight chapters of the book, each dealing with a different aspect of the production of speech, e.g., the phonation process and the air steam process. There is very little theory in this book; it deals mainly with traditional descriptive phonetics, and the function of phonetics is somewhat overshadowed. H. McKnight