Still on the textbook trail

In my neverending quest to find a good phonology textbook to teach with, I found this LINGUIST List book announcement interesting:

Title: Phonological Analysis : A Functional Approach (Third Edition)
Written By: Donald A. Burquest

Here’s the more informative blurb and TOC at SIL.org. Anyone seen/used this book? If so, what did you think of it?

[ Update, 8/2/06 —

Following up on Mike’s comment below (thanks, Mike), here’s a clipping of the book notice from Language 76.



end update ]

2 thoughts on “Still on the textbook trail

  1. Mike Maxwell

    Here’s a review of an earlier edition:

    Fallon, Paul D. 2000. Review of Phonological Analysis:
    A Functional Approach. 2nd edn. By Donald A. Burquest.
    (Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1998).
    Language 76.233-34

    According to the blurb, the 3rd edition hasn’t changed much from the second edition (which was, however, quite a change from the first edition). IIRC, one of the comments in the review was that there was nothing particularly “functional” about the theory espoused in this book. (I would says that it’s hard to think of how phonology could be functional in the same way that people have claimed syntax and morphology are functional, except that OT people have managed to claim just that…)

  2. Geoff Nathan

    I have a copy of Burquest’s book but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. At the risk of blowing my own horn, I have an intro text in the final stages of preparation that will be published by Benjamins. It has a Cognitive Grammar bias (as do I) but covers much that is traditional as well as a little OT and some of the earlier (and still unresolved) controversies such as rule ordering and abstractness.

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