The Bloomsbury Companion To Phonetics is designed to be the essential one-volume resource.
It gives an overview of key areas in phonetics. It offers a survey of current research areas and new directions in the field as well as featuring a manageable guide to beginning or developing research. The book gives readers practical guidance for study in the area.
The volume covers all the most important issues, concepts, movements and approaches in the field, looking at both the core and applied domains of phonetics and speech science. It offers insights into areas as diverse as the acquisition, production and perception of speech, and clinical and forensic phonetics. There is a state of the art exploration of voice and phonation, tone and intonation, phonetic pedagogy, speech technology and phonetic universals.
Titles in the 'Bloomsbury Companions' series are intended to bridge the gap between textbooks and the primary literature. The present volume occupies this niche admirably. Initial chapters provide practical advice on research methods, with guidance on factors that have been shown to confound results; the section on phonetic fieldwork in particular shares direct experience, and could be useful to any linguist who ventures beyond the lab. Successive chapters deal with such broad research areas as prosody or universals, and applications in clinical work, forensics, and technology. The volume concludes with suggestions for new research directions. Each contribution is brief - typically about 15 pages - and highly structured, synthesizing current literature and placing it in historical context. Contributors represent a range of countries including Australia, Canada, and Germany; there is a slight bias toward the UK in the applied chapters. Knowledge of phonetic concepts and terminaology is assumed. The book is likely to be of particular use to beginning graduate students, to contextualize theory and situate their research within ongoing programs of inquiry, or to experienced linguists who wish to review the specialized subfields of phonetics. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and researchers.
