Review of Jun ( 2014 ) Prosodic Typology II ∗ For Phonology

Prosodic Typology II gathers a set of papers detailing the intonational phonologies of 14 different languages from across the globe. As the name suggests, Prosodic Typology II is the successor to the first Prosodic Typology volume (Jun 2005b); the introductory chapter by Sun-Ah Jun describes it as an extension of the original collection. There is a great deal of continuity between this volume and the first Prosodic Typology collection. Like its predecessor, Prosodic Typology II is mostly composed of targeted articles on the intonational phonology of individual languages. These articles contain a wealth of description and analysis, and in many cases are authored by recognized experts on the languages in question. Along with extensive coverage of phrasal prosody, the articles delve into word-level phonology, discourse pragmatics, and to a lesser extent morpho-syntax. Prosodic Typology II differs from the first volume in placing greater emphasis on underdocumented intonational systems, though various better-studied languages such as Catalan and Basque are represented here as well. These descriptive articles are supplemented with an introduction and two overview chapters written by the editor of the volume, Sun-Ah Jun (one of these overviews, a chapter on the methodology of intonational research, is co-authored with Janet Fletcher). This collection also shares a clear theoretical perspective with the first volume of Prosodic Typology. All of the papers in Prosodic Typology II adopt the Autosegmental-Metrical framework: surface intonational contours are decomposed into abstract, categorical pitch targets that are associated with abstract prosodic domains (as head tones or edge tones); these targets and domains are integrated compositionally to yield the continuous pitch events of surface phonetics (further details of the A-M framework can be found in Pierrehumbert 1980, Pierrehumbert & Beckman 1988, Shattuck-Hufnagel & Turk 1996, Gussenhoven 2004, Ladd 2008a, and elsewhere). The articles uniformly employ a ToBI-style notational system, with some small points of variation (e.g. edge-marking tones at the level of the Accentual Phrase are indicated by ‘Ta’, ‘T%’, and ‘T’, depending on the chapter; see Silverman et al. 1992, Beckman & Hirschberg 1994, Pitrelli et al. 1994, Beckman et al. 2005). Two papers in the volume present full ToBI systems, complete with break indices (Prieto on Catalan and Khan on Bangladeshi Standard Bengali). By-and-large, the papers also adhere to a ‘prosody-first’ style of description: prosodic domains are characterized primarily in terms of tonal events,