Reviewed by Mark J. Elson, University of Virginia

There is no exaggeration in the publisher’s claim (front flap) that this is the most comprehensive account of Danish segmental and prosodic phonology in any language. It is a monumental piece of work: another worthy addition to Oxford’s fine series The phonology of the world’s languages. The five parts of the volume include: ‘Introduction and contrastive units’ (3–106), ‘Distinctive features and segment types’ (107–70), ‘The sonority syllable and phonotactics’ (171–248), ‘Syllables, schwa-assimilation and prosody’ (249–348); and ‘Word structure and its relation to prosody’ (349–513). The book concludes with an epilogue on sentence phonology (514–42), two appendices (543–47), a list of references (548–62), and three indices (563–96).

Part 1 (Chs. 1–2), which includes introductory sociolinguistic, historical, areal, and genetic commentary on Danish, provides a summary of previous studies. It concludes with a lengthy treatment of the phonemes of the language, prefaced by preliminary remarks in which the author, Hans Basbøll, summarizes his theoretical and organizational assumptions. Some of these assumptions may not find universal acceptance but in no way diminish the discussion (e.g. the phoneme as a unit of surface contrast, the existence of a phonemic as well as a morphophonemic level, the inclusion in morphophonemic representations of any surface segment that does not alternate, the rejection of a biunique relationship between the phonemic and phonetic levels).

In Part 2 (Chs. 3–5), B develops his view of distinctive features, adopting the position of strict binarism (i.e. a feature is specified as plus or minus). He applies these features to Danish phonemes and offers a full discussion of the phenomenon of r-coloring (i.e. the effect of r on a contiguous vowel). The remaining chapters (Chs. 6–16) include a detailed discussion of B’s conception of the syllable and his assumptions relating to the syllabification of Danish words, in which phonotactic as well as certain prosodic phenomena (including stød, a syllable prosody manifested by laryngealization) are discussed. B’s model of the syllable is original, based an approach that he terms general-phonetic deductivism (175). The result, the sonority syllable model, relies on phonetic principles that are not language specific, and thus B’s model differs significantly from other approaches, which frequently proceed from the facts of one or more languages. The discussion then turns to the phonology of word-level phenomena (including derivation and inflection) and features a comprehensive analysis of the occurrence of stød. B introduces his theory of grammatical morphemes (354–57), which he terms graded productivity (351), claiming that it ‘allows a simple unified account of the main distribution of the Modern Danish stød’ (351).

B’s book, unlike others in the series, does not adopt feature geometry or metrical theory as its primary descriptive framework, and as a result, despite a great amount of factual information, this volume makes fewer demands on the reader than previous analyses. The original theories of the syllable and grammatical morphemes render this book of potential interest beyond the area of Danish phonology. Even those with no background in Danish or the Germanic languages will find it readily accessible.