A Course in Phonology

Rating:
Summary: A course in indecisiveness
Review: A Course in Phonology seemed to me to be a course in bad editing. The one thing that most kept this book from being helpful in the learning of phonology is that it never used the same terminology chapter to chapter. The terminology switches were just assumed by the author to be known by the reader. The glossary did not have entries for any of these terminology switches, in fact the glossary had precious few entries that gave definitions past its own root word. The second annoying thing about this book were the homework assignments at the end of each chapter. There was no answer key, and they spent an entire chapter discussing rules for English phonology, then decide to give French, Catalan, and some bizzare Micronesian language as the assignments all of which had different rules that were discussed in the chapter. The accompanying workbook also had it's problems among which was the missing answer key.

Rating:
Summary: Not what I was hoping for
Review: As an introduction to autosegemental phonology, this text was a disappointment. While the authors obviously have a great deal of knowledge about and experience with the theory, I found the discussion to be incomplete in many places and the examples to be frequently mismatched to the discussion. There are serious problems with the practice problem sets at the end of each chapter as well.
Specifically:
1) the terminology used in these exercises is not consisent throughout the book or even in connection with the chapter they are intended to reinforce.
2) no solution set is available to which one can turn when no satisfactory solution is evident (a great disadvantage to the professor).
3) frequently the discussion in a chapter presents rules and justifications for English only and then the practice problems deal with languages that obey completely different sets of norms (and the rules may or may not have been identified as language-specific).
An overarching problem is that the discussion presented by Roca and Johnson fails to account for the fact that the operations of phonetics and phonology are language-specific, and so much of what is presented deals with overgeneralizations. Of even greater concern from a theoretical point of view is their inconsistent dealings with the importance of diachronic factors. While declaring on one hand that factoring out diachronic linguistics is key to the autosegmental approach, the authors in other places invoke history to resolve problems that cannot be solved autosegmentally.
In sum, this is a confusing, incomplete text in serious need of revision.

Rating:
Summary: As a student
Review: taking a course which references this book, I'd say to all professors... keep looking. Decidedly un-perspicuous. At times maddening. Sorry to not be more constructive, but I've got this assignment due...