Reviews for Computational Approaches to the Lexicon

The average rating for Computational Approaches to the Lexicon based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-02-09 00:00:00 Jessica Nelson This book is a bit of a curiosity as it is probably the last work to have been (partially) written by Daniel Jones. Apart from this, it is a mixed bag of exhaustiveness on the given topic and the fact the the book is quite old. On the one hand, a comprehensive account of segmental and suprasegmental features of Russian phonetics is provided, and the authors include thorough and practical advice aimed at (British) English native speakers on how to achieve acceptable pronunciation of Russian speech sounds and avoid common errors. On the other hand, while most of the information in the book is valid today, some of it is clearly outdated. Sometimes the authors show awareness of certain (new back then) trends in pronunciation and make a mention of of it (e.g. in /ˈdʲvʲerʲ/ vs. /ˈdvʲerʲ/, the former variant is said to be the standard one, and the latter is said to be increasingly common among young speakers, even though I don't think the former is used today by native speakers at all). However, they also write about things that are simply incorrect in today's language, for example describing /tʃ/ as apical, even though it's mainly dorsal (the apical variant is limited to regional varieties), or saying that /ŋ/ does not exist in any way in Russian speech, although it actually appears as an allophone of /n̪/ before velar stops. Thus, if you plan to use this work for its intended purpose, make sure it is to complement a more modern textbook on Russian phonetics.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-08 00:00:00 Jon Stewart Someone with a language/linguistics background won't find much new content in this text. It truly is an introduction, an overview, to linguistics. I found mostly some odd bits of trivia; the rest was primarily review. However, Winkler definitely has piqued my interest in semantics and research into Anglo-Saxon, and to a lesser extent AAVE.