Martin J. BallRezensionen

I'm a little bit frowny because someone else had this idea before I did, and there's a definite grab-bag of refs/annbib feel to a lot of this, but, y'know, of course they thought of it already, and I'm a lot more smiley because hey! clinical sociolinguistics is a recognized field of endeavour! You can't evaluate people for pathological speech features or perform effective interventions based on out-of-the-can descriptions/charts! People over there talk differently than people over here, and that's okay! Sociolinguistics also has a lot to say about language and power, and that can be applied to a clinical context so very productively because nobody wants to be a bully! I love this world and this choice I've made. Maybe I'll do a PhD yet, but first I want to get certified and help people. And I want to write my thesis on misdiagnoses of pathologies in speakers of nonstandard or EAL varieties. And everything--teaching, editing, crit theory, dialectology, voice quality, the muscles of the larynx, hell, imitating the sounds of Elvish out of the appendices of The Lord of the Rings when I was eight--comes together in the end.

I found this book disappointing but, to be fair, I may have had unrealistic expectations.

My hope was that fragments of speech (eg consonants and vowels) can be described in some hearing-dependent fashion, eg that the essence of a particular vowel consists of this particular frequency with some pattern of overtones.
What was very clear from the book, however, is that this is not how linguists think of phonetics. Their concern is almost exclusively with how fragments of speech are said, not with how they are heard. Of course this is a reasonable (and much-easier) starting point, but it's not a subject of much interest to me.

I think that to learn more about what it is that interests me, the best approach is to give up on any other phonetics books and go directly to books on aspects of computer speech.