Written for students of linguistics, applied linguistics and speech therapy, this dictionary covers over 2,000 terms in phonetics and phonology. In addition to providing a comprehensive, yet concise, guide to an enormous number of individual terms, it also includes an explanation of the most important theoretical approaches to phonology. Its usefulness as a reference tool is further enhanced by the inclusion of pronunciations, notational devices and symbols, earliest sources of terms, suggestions for further reading, and advice with regard to usage. The wide range of topics explained * Classical phonology, including American Structuralism and the Prague School * Contemporary approaches, including Autosegmental Phonology, Metrical Phonology, Dependency Phonology, Government Phonology and Lexical Phonology * Prosodic ideas in phonology, both traditional and contemporary ^ * * historical phonology * Intonation and tonology This dictionary devotes space to the various theoretical approaches in proportion to their importance, but it concentrates most heavily on non-theory-bound descriptive terminology. It will remain a definitive reference for years to come.
Author
Robert Lawrence "Larry" Trask was Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex in England. He was an authority on the Basque language: his book The History of Basque (1997) is an essential reference on diachronic Basque linguistics and probably the best introduction to Basque linguistics as a whole. He was also an authority on historical linguistics, and had written about the problem of the origin of language. He also published two introductory books to linguistics: Language: The basics (1995) and Introducing Linguistics (coauthored with Bill Mayblin) (2000), and several dictionaries on different topics of this science: A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics (1993), A dictionary of phonetics and phonology (1996), A student's dictionary of language and linguistics (1997), Key concepts in language and linguistics (1999), The dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics (2000) and The Penguin dictionary of English grammar (2000). He was at work compiling an etymological dictionary of Basque when he died, posthumously published by Max W. Wheeler (Etymological Dictionary of Basque, 2008).
