Sound
Patterns of Spoken English is a concise, to-the-point compendium of
information about the casual pronunciation of everyday English as compared
to formal citation forms.
The book examines changes that occur to certain sounds and in certain parts of words and syllables in the casual, unmonitored speech of native English speakers. It outlines major phonological processes found in conversational English; reviews and criticizes attempts to include these processes in phonological theory; and surveys experimental approaches to explaining casual English pronunciation. Among the varieties of English covered are General American and Standard Southern British, but many other accents are mentioned, especially those of mainland Britain.
Sound Patterns of Spoken English is of interest to students and scholars in a wide variety of fields, including sociolinguistics, lexicography, rhetoric, language learning and speech sciences, and has an accompanying website with examples from different accents.
'This is an excellent book that gives a true account of what English speech is really like.'
Gerry Knowles, University of Lancaster
'Linda Shockey addresses questions of interest to nearly every phonetician and phonologist, providing extensive examples of attested conversational reductions in numerous dialects of English. By presenting the reductions along with their linguistic conditioning factors, she strikes a forceful blow against the belief that casual speech is simply sloppy speech. Sound Patterns of Spoken English will be of interest to theoretical phonologists and experimental phoneticians, as well as researchers in speech perception, language acquisition and speech technology.'
Lisa Lavoie, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
