The Oxford University Press series âPhonology of the Worldâs Languagesâ has become an indispensable source for detailed, high-quality analyses of sound systems of individual languages. Tomas Riadâs volume on Swedish is a most welcome addition to the series. In this review, I will first sketch the bookâs contents, chapter by chapter, and then offer a few more general remarks with some overall evaluation

Salmons, Joseph

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Tomas Riad: The Phonology of Swedish. Oxford: Oxford University Press2014, 368 pp.The Oxford University Press series “Phonology of the World’s Languages” hasbecome an indispensable source for detailed, high-quality analyses of soundsystems of individual languages. Tomas Riad’s volume on Swedish is a mostwelcome addition to the series. In this review, I will first sketch the book’s con-tents, chapter by chapter, and then offer a few more general remarks with someoverall evaluation.The introduction provides a compact but very rich overview of variationin Swedish, which becomes a subplot of the book. Central Swedish, a varietyclose to the national standard, is taken as a focus and point of reference. Thischapter frames a set of issues of language policy and resources on the standard,along with dialects of Swedish and inter-Scandinavian communication, butalso Swedish outside of Sweden, from older settlements like the one in southernUkraine to newer ones in Argentina and the United States. The chapter closesby introducing conventions used in the book. These include the use of ● tosignal in underlying representations where surface vowels may appear and ■ tosignal where an underlyingly present vowel has been syncopated, respectively.The second chapter treats vowels, first with a detailed treatment of al-lophony and then the phonemic system. The vowel system is presented inmany tables and graphs, showing featural characterizations, positions in theacoustic space (using Bark rather than just F1xF2), and images of articulation(for lip rounding). Given the detail on both phonetics and phonology, the pres-entation is remarkably clear in ways that would be ideal pedagogically, e.g. inthe complex patterns of /e/ and /ɛ/ before rhotics (24ff.). The featural analysisof vowels would allow an easy and interesting comparison to the approach inDresher (2009), a work that was gaining traction only when this manuscriptmust have been nearing completion.The third chapter covers consonants, organized parallel to the previouschapter. Laryngeal features are treated as privative and, as detailed below, Riadadopts a laryngeal realist position — distinguishing ‘voice’ from ‘aspiration’languages (Iverson & Salmons 1995, others). While quantity in vowels istreated as derivative, he posits long and short consonants in the phonemic in-ventory, marking the long as moraic. Like Kristoffersen (2000) for Norwegian,Riad analyzes /ŋ/ as a phoneme, rather than deriving it from /ng/, as is oftenNorsk Lingvistisk Tidsskrift · Årgang 33 · 2015  113NLT 2015-1 ombrukket 1.qxp_NLT  03.09.15  16.02  Side 113done for West Germanic languages. This analysis involves making a case forambisyllabicity, and he mounts a strong one. The facts in North Germanic,ultimately, are not so different from those in German or English, and a simplecomparative study could begin from Riad’s description and include all of Northand West Germanic.Chapter 4 builds on 2 and 3, treating a wide range of segmental processes,which can be illustrated with retroflexion and ‘obsolete segmental rules’.Retroflexion, present in Swedish and Norwegian varieties with an apical mainform of /r/, is analyzed in treating ‘coalescence’, with r + laminal, yielding asingle output segment (/barn/ ‘child’, [bɑːɳ]) and ‘spreading’, with /ʂ/ or theproduct of coalescence followed by anterior, laminal coronals (/barn+strʉmp-a/ ‘child’s sock’, [bɑːɳʂʈrøm:pa]). Riad lays out a variety of key phonological,areal and sociolinguistic complexities involved in retroflexion. The discussionof ‘obsolete segmental rules’ treats “morphophonemic alternations that are nolonger phonologically productive, but which still represent large correspon-dences in paradigms and lexical relations” (p. 108), thus raising the fundamen-tal issue of the relationship between what needs to be encoded in synchronicgrammar vs. what is historical residue. In addition to a short treatment of thepan-Germanic problems of ablaut and umlaut (where Riad restricts consider-ation to “patterns that seem to still have some phonological life”, p. 111), hedelves into lenition of velar stops (k, g), from the historical correlation (palatal-ization to ɕ, j before front stressed front vowels). Failure of palatalization, aswith [k] in kör ‘choir’, typically reflects borrowing or affective vocabulary whilepalatalized forms before back vowels, as with [ɕ] in tjuv ‘thief ’, are taken as ev-idence that the fricative/approximate forms are phonemes. (A note here on thedistribution of j vs. ʝ might have been helpful to those less familiar with suchpatterns of variation, expanding on the sketch on pp. 59–60.)The next chapters cover sounds above the segmental level: Chapter 5 coversthe prosodic word, while 6 deals with the foot and stress patterns. Followinghis own recent work, in the minimal prosodic word, stress is obligatory andculminative (the latter a notion which might need some clarification for lessexperienced readers); in the maximal prosodic word, word accent is obligatoryand culminative. The chapter concludes with some comments on the forma-tion of prosodic words in syntax, notably through incorporation.The seventh chapter treats minimality with regard to free words and roots,showing a preference for branching rhymes. Riad uses this ‘optimal’ prosodicstructure to treat hypocoristics, a discussion that invites comparison to the vast114 Joseph SalmonsNLT 2015-1 ombrukket 1.qxp_NLT  03.09.15  16.02  Side 114literature (some cited in the book) on West Germanic hypocoristics. Chapter8 builds on this, addressing segmental quantity and prosodic weight. The com-plementarity of vowel and consonant quantity is presented, together with thecontrasting moraic status, with V monomoraic and V: bimoraic but C non-moraic and C: moraic. In this chapter we get the full argument on why Riadposits distinctive consonant quantity (with vowel quantity derived). One cen-tral argument is that this analysis yields a “simpler and more consistent gram-mar with fewer ad hoc assumptions” (p. 165), including that positingconsonant quantity allows us to capture vowel lengthening in stressed syllablesin a way that distinctive vowel quantity would not. While they are differentlanguages, this analysis invites comparison to treatments of related patterns inNorwegian (Kristoffersen 2000: 42–43, 116–120) and Icelandic and Faroese(Árnason 2011). In Chapter 9, we have a brief introduction to tonal accents, with attentionto North Germanic generally, covering accents 1 and 2, phonological repre-sentations and the contours. This sets up Chapters 10 and 11, which treat theprosodic status of morphemes in the lexicon in terms of stress and tone, re-spectively. Riad sketches first how phonology and morphology interact in stressplacement in complex forms and then explores how tone fits into this picture.Riad begins from phonological stress assignment and goes on to argue thatmorphology “is directly involved in the stress system” (p. 193). Such prosodicspecification is already necessary to deal with tone. Riad distinguishes fourtypes of morphemes, prosodically unspecified, tonic, pre- and post-tonic, alongwith some minor patterns, including a detailed review of the combinatoricpossibilities, showing how conflicts arise and are resolved. Phonological historyis prominent here too of course, with a discussion of etymology and borrow-ings. While accent 2 has often been analyzed as a signal of polysyllabicity, Riadtreats this as an epiphenomenal consequence of two facts: accent 2 is assignedwith (1) posttonic suffixes on stressed roots and (2) forms that have two ormore stresses (p. 233). Two of the most engaging in the book, these chapterssynthesize some of Riad’s most important contributions to Swedish sound pat-terns. Chapter 12 provides a brief sketch of intonational patterns, an under-ex-plored area of Swedish sound patterns. Riad makes repeated comparisons tointonation in other Germanic languages and makes various notes on neededwork on intonation, e.g. how it aligns with morphosyntax (p. 269) or patternsof variation (pp. 273–274).Bokomtale  115NLT 2015-1 ombrukket 1.qxp_NLT  03.09.15  16.02  Side 115The thirteenth chapter deals with syllables and phonotactics, providingagain both detailed description (tables of onset and coda clusters, for instance,and where prosodically which vowels can occur) and rich comparison to otherGermanic languages.The fourteenth and final chapter deals with orthography, an issue touchedon throughout the book. Swedish spelling is relatively close to phonemic, butthe survey of grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspon-dences is certainly helpful, especially since it is contextualized in terms of rel-atively recent sound changes. Interestingly, sister volumes in the series oftendo not treat the topic in depth despite much more complex relationships be-tween spelling and phonology, like Basbøll (2005) on Danish or Wiese (1996)on German.Turning now to more general matters, Riad’s broad perspective on Swedishphonology is apparent throughout the volume, with regard to the intercon-nections across various phonological domains, between synchrony and di-achrony, or connecting language and society, for instance. The references reflectthis contextualization with regard to comparative Germanic and to theoreticalphonology and related areas. When I first looked at the table of contents, Iworried that the organization would be cumbersome, with issues like tone,weight and prosody showing up time and again. After reading the whole book,it becomes amply clear that these and the other themes just noted all runthroughout the book — this volume provides a tightly woven narrative ofSwedish sound patterns where particular matters are brought to the fore butkept in context. I have given a set of examples above where this book provides an easy andobvious starting point for future research. But in fact it is filled with implica-tions for phonologists and other specialists in speech sounds who do not workon Swedish. For instance, Riad gives examples of ‘damped’ or ‘buzzing’ real-izations of [i:] and [y:] as [i:z] and [y:z] (p. 21, see also p. 29 on the rise of a [β]off-glide after high back vowels, [fi:zn] fin ‘fine’ and [bu:k] buk ‘book’. A grow-ing literature has illustrated similar patterns of hardening, once regarded ashighly exotic (Mortensen 2012), and Riad’s discussion suggests that there maybe an opportunity to observe the process unfolding in real time. As noted for chapter 3 above, Riad uses ‘monovalent’ laryngeal featuresand adopts ‘laryngeal realism’; he reviews arguments for Swedish as a systemwith overmarking, i.e. as employing both [spread glottis] and [voice] actively.Riad’s presentation, as elsewhere, is sober and balanced, but I confess to har-116 Joseph SalmonsNLT 2015-1 ombrukket 1.qxp_NLT  03.09.15  16.02  Side 116boring more uncertainty than he seems to about the case for phonological over-marking, given that we find here the spreading of spread glottis, but not ofvoicing (p. 49). And it is generally common for languages to phonetically en-hance featural contrasts (my own variety of Southern U.S. English is surely an‘aspiration’ system, but with heavy phonetic voicing by enhancement). In thisspirit, rate of speech phenomena might also be phonetic rather than phono-logical.  But this is no criticism of Riad’s analysis, instead a call for further workin this area.One challenge in writing this kind of volume is how much current theoryshould or can be deployed. Riad draws freely on a wide range of modernphonological thought, but does so in such a light-handed way that a readermight miss it. While some earlier volumes in the series drew directly on LexicalPhonology in particular (Wiese 1996, Kristoffersen 2000), the landscape hasshifted and Riad does not do so nearly as directly, and the term does not appearin the index. As noted, ‘optimality’ is extensively discussed for prosodic struc-tures. Here and elsewhere, he draws on Optimality Theory, but without a singletableau and without committing himself overly to the theory-internal machin-ery of this or other frameworks. This approach works well and I suspect wouldappeal to language-specialist students. Most of the other phonologies of Germanic in the Oxford series have farless to say about phonetics and the relationship between phonetics and phonol-ogy; the richness of that aspect of the present volume is welcome. Some of thisreflects the amount of recent work that Riad has been able to draw on and acomparison of this book with Kristoffersen’s fine 2000 Phonology of Norwegianoften highlights how theoretically informed mainstream thinking about speechsounds has evolved over the last 15 years.Every book has infelicities, but this book has few that I can find. The toneis generally relatively informal and the writing clean and lively. Typographicalerrors include a mere handful of things like these: a bad line break with g[o:]tisk(p. 34) or “hypocoristics formation” for ‘hypocoristic’ (p. 152).As the foregoing should make clear, The Phonology of Swedish stands outeven within the strong series in which it was published. It provides the neces-sary synthesis and state-of-the-art summary, but goes well beyond that. Thisbook represents a major achievement as a serious piece of scholarship, and it issomething that anyone working on Germanic languages and phonology hasto read, and in addition to those interested in sound patterns more broadly,including phonetics, sound change, sociophonetics and more.  Bokomtale  117NLT 2015-1 ombrukket 1.qxp_NLT  03.09.15  16.02  Side 117ReferencesÁrnason, Kristján 2011: The phonology of Icelandic and Faroese. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.Basbøll, Hans 2005: The phonology of Danish. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Booij, Geert 1995: The phonology of Dutch. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Dresher, B. Elan 2009: The contrastive hierarchy in phonology. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.Iverson, Gregory K. & Joseph C. Salmons 1995: Aspiration and laryngeal rep-resentation in Germanic. Phonology 12, 369–396.Kristoffersen, Gjert 2000: The phonology of Norwegian.New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press.Mortensen, David 2012: The emergence of obstruents after high vowels. Di-achronica 29, 434–470.Wiese, Richard 1996: The phonology of German. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (2nded., 2000.)Joseph SalmonsCenter for the Study of Upper Midwestern CulturesUniversity Club 404-405432 East Campus MallUniversity of Wisconsin – MadisonMadison, WI 53706USAjsalmons@wisc.edu118 Joseph SalmonsNLT 2015-1 ombrukket 1.qxp_NLT  03.09.15  16.02  Side 118

Tomas Riad: The Phonology of Swedish.

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Tomas Riad: The Phonology of Swedish.

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