A review of Wendy L. Bowcher and Bradley A. Smith (eds.), Systemic Phonology: Recent Studies in English. Sheffield: Equinox, 2014. vii + 451 pp. £85.00 (hbk), £30.00 (pbk)

Correspondence: mjmsxjj@gmail. com School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China Systemic Phonology: Recent Studies in English is an extremely timely addition to the literature of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Despite the importance of phonology to any general description of language, the editors note that this is the first collection focusing on phonology within a SFL framework in the last twenty years. As the title indicates, the collection focuses on the phonological and intonational aspects of the English language within SFL. The introduction by the editors presents a useful orientation to systemic phonology and its place within the general field of phonology, as well as a clear introduction to the purpose and scope of each of the chapters. The volume is divided in five sections and offers an interesting range of studies in systemic phonology. The first section, “Intonation: Construing the Textual Metafunction,” includes four chapters focusing on the role of intonation in the creation of text in context. In Chapter 1, Gerard O’Grady examines the relationship between prosodic prominence and information structure. He illustrates with examples the ambiguity of prosodic prominence in signaling New information, and provides a reconceptualization of what is meant by Given and New. Two different uses of the term New are identified: New1 and New2. New1 is used to mark items which are non-recoverable from the previous context, while New2 is associated with items given prominence for being of particular interest in the discourse. Since the majority of prominences fall on lexical items, O’Grady investigates the relationship between lexical items and tonic and pretonic prominence in three texts: two speeches by the former UK prime minister, Tony Blair, and a monologue from Halliday’s book, A Course in Spoken English: Intonation (1970). The results show that speakers may give prominence to lexical items and project them as New2, regardless of whether the particular items are previously mentioned. By offering a useful categorization of New information to explain prosodic prominence choices, this study greatly enriches our understanding of the semogenic power of intonation in signaling information structure and realizing speakers’ communicative goals. The next chapter, by Annabelle Lukin, explores the relationship between the contextual parameter of mode and the textual metafunction, by analyzing a TV news report concerning the invasion of Iraq. More specifically, it examines how the intonational