Tuesday 25 October 2011

A Critical Introduction to Phonetics

I've bought another book on phonetics. The author is Ken Lodge, and the title is A Critical Introduction to Phonetics. It was published in 2009 by the Continuum International Publishing Group. I would have been greatly astonished if the title had been An Uncritical Introduction ... .



















Here's the table of contents. More on the book in a later blog entry.
(Phew, what a stack of books on my bedside table)

4 comments:

  1. Petr, we seem to have been buying the same books this month...

    I have this one by Lodge. I bought it in 2009, though, but haven't read it yet...

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  2. Yap, we're subsidising the book trade

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  3. I bought it a couple of years ago too. What's surprising is that I actually got round to reading it.

    My memory of it isn't very fresh, but I remember being rather disappointed. I felt that in trying to be 'critical' the author came across as picky or pedantic and that this was made worse by the fact that there was no shortage of things in the text that the reader could be picky or pedantic about.

    The experience left me annoyed by the concept of a 'critical introduction'. What is it? An introduction to the basics of the subject for beginners, or a critical review for the long since initiated? Attempting to combine the two is asking for trouble.

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  4. @Paul Carley: Thanks for your critical reminiscences!

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