Phonology: A Cognitive View

by Jonathan Kaye

Designed to acquaint the reader with the field of phonology -- the study of the systems of linguistically significant sounds -- this book begins with a brief introduction to linguistics and a... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805804668
• ISBN13: 9780805804669
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 184 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A fine introduction that takes you to serious phonology

This rather terse volume is described as being for a non-specialist audience. Yet, specialities in linguistics tend to be so very narrow that I imagine even linguists who have not studied phonology recently might benefit from it. I read it as an EFL teacher with an interest in this area of linguistics as APPLIED linguistics. If you don't know the difference between phonology and phonetics. Or if you have no idea what a phoneme is or why it is such an important but ultimately non-existent thing, this book will get you to a new state of knowledge. I liked this book because it clearly explains linguistics in that highly technical way that follows from Chomsky and Halle, but it also draws on psycholinguistic research in the way the popular writer, Pinker, might. As I often do, I recommend this type of book for people in language teaching and literacy education, since the actual level of linguistic awareness in these professions is often appallingly low. Books like this might help those deciding language policy in education to know something about language. Perhaps there is a list in the making here: books that language and literacy educators ought to read so that they are not ignorant about language. This book would definitely make the short list.

A terrific introduction...

to the new "autosegmental" approach in phonology. Kaye's examples taken largely from his field of African linguistics are a worthy correction to "eurocentric" viewpoints.