Bert Vaux ( 1998 ) . The phonology of Armenian . Oxford : Clarendon

This delightful book is a descriptive presentation of all aspects of Armenian word phonology.* Although the author assumes a particular theoretical stance, this does not in any way detract from the descriptive value of the book (more on this point below, where it is suggested that the strong theoretical commitment of the author in fact adds to the book’s strength, even for a reader who does not subscribe to the same theoretical view as the author). The book is part of the series on the phonology of the world’s languages edited by Jacques Durand, and it closely follows the format of the other books so far published in the series. It starts with a concise but thorough and interesting chapter on the history, dialectology and basic descriptive facts of Armenian phonology. The second chapter introduces Rules and Representations Theory, which Vaux uses in his detailed theoretical accounts of phonological phenomena in subsequent chapters. Probably aware that most potential readers of the book (whether they are primarily interested in Armenian or in phonological theory) are unlikely to share his theoretical views, Vaux is careful to explicitly state all steps of theoretical reasoning in his analyses throughout the book. As a result, I have found later chapters on specific phonological phenomena perfectly readable without referring back to the second chapter. Chapter 3, by far the longest and most detailed chapter in the book, provides an extensive discussion of syllabification in Armenian. Chapter 4 discusses stress and metrical structure within words. Chapter 5 is on vowel harmony. Chapters 6 and 7 present consonant–vowel interactions and consonant alternations involving laryngeal features. Finally, Chapter 8 presents a brief collection of processes involving prosodic morphology, such as reduplication and hypocoristics. One of the first features of the book that strikes the reader is Vaux’s admirable attention to detail. For example, Vaux argues that certain schwaC zero alternations are best viewed as schwa insertion rather than schwa deletion. Kornfilt (1997) faces a similar choice in her Turkish grammar, and simply asserts that the process is one of deletion. Vaux takes a very different approach. Rather than simply stating his own preference for an insertion process, he presents a large number of arguments for his position, any single one of which would have been perfectly convincing. The arguments range from the relatively obvious (e.g. the predictability of the presence and location of schwas) to the