Phonology: A Cognitive Grammar Introduction

Cognitive Linguistics in Practice #3

by Geoffrey S. Nathan

Nathan, Dr. Geoffrey S.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction

171 pages, Paperback

First published September 18, 2008

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was initially very excited to see a book that tries to take a more Cognitive linguistics inspired approach to phonology. However, Nathan is very disappointing in its totality: it tries to be both a textbook of about 150 pages that goes through phonetics, a history of phonology (Structuralism, Generative phonology with the Sound Patterns of English, Autosegmental Phonology, Optimality Theory, and then more cognitive approaches), and some well-known examples without going deep enough over them to really understand what is going on, unless you already read it somewhere else.
Then the "Cognitive Grammar" part: he keeps referring to both Lakoff and Langacker as the founders of Cognitive Grammar, while I am pretty sure it's mostly a Langacker kind of thing—that is not to say that Lakoff was somehow involved, but still... Also he gets some crucial terms wrong, like calling Langacker's (1987) 'Content Requirement' the 'Content Constraint' etc.
I was disappointed maybe mostly because in the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Cuyckens & Geeraerts 2007), Nathan wrote the chapter on phonology and I really like that. This book (2008), however, did not continue that tendency.