Book reviews

Abstract

The work under review is one of the more outstanding among the rich harvest of publications dealing with intonation that have recently seen the light. As its title shows, this book is meant to cover, on an introductory level, the study of prosodic phenomena in the English language. As such, it should be useful for anyone who is interested in the subject and has at least a basic familiarity with phonetics and linguistics, including those with a theoretical linguistic orientation and those involved in teaching English as a foreign language.In eleven chapters, the book deals with the forms and functions of (British) English intonation. In the first three chapters preliminary questions are discussed, concerning the phonetic characteristics of prosodic phenomena, the definition of the syllable, the stress-accent distinction, principles of stress and accent distribution, and speech rhythm (the discussion of accent-placement principles seems somewhat out of place here, as much of the material is covered a second time in later chapters on intonational function). Chapters 4 and 5 present a detailed description of the forms of English speech melody. Chapters 6-11, finally, deal with the functions of intonation in English. Chapter 6 briefly outlines the different ways in which intonation is believed to function. The other chapters elaborate on each of these functions, discussing in detail the connections between intonation and information structure, grammatical structure, illocutionary force, attitude, and discourse structure, respectively. Couper-Kuhlen illustrates her discussions with examples drawn from a corpus of recorded materials which she has collected over the years. Excerpts from these materials are available on an accompanying cassette, which I unfortunately did not have at my disposal.In her description of the forms of English intonation, Couper-Kuhlen relies heavily on the British tradition of intonational analysis, in particu-Linguistics 27 (1989), 939-973