A Critical Introduction to Phonetics

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A Critical Introduction to Phonetics presents core areas of the subject from refreshing new perspectives. It takes a new stance on the presentation of basic phonetic skills for students of linguistics. Using examples drawn from a wide-range of languages Ken Lodge introduces the key aspects of phonetics, examining the difference between speech and writing, the physiology of speech production, basic and detailed articulation, and acoustic phonetics.
The book contains a practical guide to transcriptions from sound recordings, and a section on applications of phonetics to fields of study such as language variation and accent. A Critical Introduction to Phonetics provides comprehensive coverage of all the key areas of the subject, and contains chapter summaries to help the reader navigate the text. Critical thinking is prompted throughout, and this will therefore be essential reading for students on introductory phonetics courses both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

Reviews

"Lodge uses his practical classroom experience to provide safe guidance, and his theoretical perspective to provide a phonetically more accurate non-segmental foundation to phonetics. I particularly like the extensive introductions to continuous speech, prosody, resonance and segmentation, which will be of interest to phonologists and more advanced students of phonetics as well as beginners" - Professor James M. Scobbie, Speech Science Research Centre, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK.
An eye-opener for those who have not considered the medium and long-term effects produced by articulators of different sizes and shapes moving at different speeds and with different constraints while producing a so-called string of speech sounds' The Journal of International Phonetic Association, 2010
Make[s] for interesting reading, as [it] combine[s] excellent coverage of the basic issues with the author's... theoretical perspective. A Critical Introduction to Phonetics not only offers a thorough treatment of such aspects as articulation, transcription, and acoustics, but also stresses the fundamentally continuous nature of the speech stream. -- The Year's Work in English Studies, Volume 90

Author Bio

Ken Lodge is Reader in Linguistics and Phonetics at the University of East Anglia, UK.