Preface

This is a textbook intended to introduce students of English, of English linguistics and of linguistics to the phonology of Present-day English. It is not a reference manual on the subject; nor is it an introduction to current phonological theory (in relation to English or otherwise). To qualify for the former, it would have to be less selective in its coverage. In particular, the coverage of different accents of English is highly selective, for the ones treated here (Southern British ‘Received Pronunciation’, ‘General American’ and ‘Scottish Standard English’) can hardly be claimed to form a ‘representative sample’, whatever such a sample may be representative of. While this choice of reference accents is advantageous in many respects (not least in practical terms), it covers only part of the typological spectrum. Some of the rest, which is neither small nor, in typological terms, insignificant, is dealt with on a mere handful of pages appended to chapter 3. I do not pretend to do justice to those other varieties of English; I merely hope to make the reader aware of the fact that varieties of English exist which are different from those that I focus on, and that those differences are of considerable phonological interest.