37.1442, Reviews: Phonology in Language Documentation: Gabriela Caballero; Laura McPherson (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1442. Tue Apr 14 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1442, Reviews: Phonology in Language Documentation: Gabriela Caballero; Laura McPherson (2025)

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Date: 14-Apr-2026
From: Michael B. Maxwell [mmaxwell at umd.edu]
Subject: Gabriela Caballero; Laura McPherson (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-3938

Title: Phonology in Language Documentation
Series Title: Elements in Phonology
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/ch/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/phonetics-and-phonology/phonology-language-documentation?format=PB&isbn=9781009543620

Author(s): Gabriela Caballero; Laura McPherson

Reviewer: Michael B. Maxwell

SUMMARY
This is a very short book (as are the other Cambridge "Elements in
Phonology" books): 43 pages, not counting references; there is no
index.  The topic is phonological analysis for language documentation.
More specifically, it covers the phonology of spoken languages.  Sign
languages are not covered, although there are some useful references
(p.4).  I will have more to say about what is not covered in my
evaluation.
The introductory chapter sets the stage by explaining what language
documentation is, how phonology fits into that, and the increasing
emphasis during the last few decades on making documentation useful to
the communities whose language the documentation covers.  The
languages the authors have worked in are also described; these
languages are used as examples in later chapters.
The second chapter briefly describes lexicography, arguing that while
corpora are of course needed, a lexicon is a valuable---indeed,
necessary---resource for phonological studies.  Also discussed is the
question of what form of a lexeme to use as a dictionary headword,
illustrating some of the issues from Seenku, a Mande language studied
by one of the authors (McPherson)---in this case showing how phonology
is important for lexicography.
The next chapter concerns the importance of corpus work for
phonological analysis, including its importance for documenting
post-lexical phonology (something which of course is unlikely to be
documented when doing pure lexicography).  This chapter is illustrated
by examples taken from work by the other author (Caballero) on
Choguita Rarámuri (Uto-Aztecan), as well as several other Mexican
languages.  The issue of reproducibility is also addressed; the
authors call for audio recordings linked to transcriptions.
The fourth chapter advocates documenting language games (sometimes
called ludlings) and music; the authors describe "a symbiotic
relationship between the study of a language's phonology and the
documentation of its verbal arts" (p. 29).
Chapter 5 is about the place of phonology in grammars; the authors
claim (p. 32) that "The role of sound systems and their analysis in
the context of grammatical descriptions has, however, been generally
neglected in the literature".   The point is not that phonology has
been totally neglected in grammars, but rather that it has been
limited to "phonemic inventories, allophonic processes, syllable
structure, distributional constraints on sound patterns, and
morphophonological phenomena, as well as discussion of prosodic
characteristics and processes... with phonological phenomena above the
word level generally absent" (citing Rice; indeed much of this chapter
is a summary of Rice 2014).
The penultimate chapter concerns the goals of the language community,
with some emphasis on the need for orthographic representation to
support language learning.  As the authors note (citing references
from 1977 through 2014), this is not a new concern; indeed, Kenneth
Pike's 1947 book on phonology is titled "Phonemics, a technique for
reducing languages to writing", and his 1948 book on tone languages
devotes a section to "Practical Orthographies in Tone Languages", not
to mention a brief section on music and other verbal arts.
The final chapter largely recaps the first: it encourages phonologists
to be involved in language documentation, suggests that computational
tools "may help streamline the process of data transcription", and
again raises the question of who owns the data about an individual
language.
EVALUATION
I was surprised by how much is not covered.  As I mentioned above, the
book does not discuss sign languages apart from some citations.  But
more generally, this book would be more useful if it had been expanded
to talk more about what phonological descriptions should be, and how
they should be built.
There is no discussion, for example, of computational tools for
acoustic phonetics, phonological analysis, lexicography, or corpus
analysis, despite the fact that there are widely used applications in
each of these domains.  There is a passing mention of tools on page
17: "...new tools and methods are available to produce
state-of-the-art phonological descriptions and analyses of both
segmental and suprasegmental phonological patterns and phenomena", but
the discussion immediately returns to general descriptions of what a
corpus is.  I was not expecting in depth analysis of existing
computational tools, and of course the lifetime of tools can be
short---although FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx, which supports
lexicography and interlinear text analysis, as well as morphological
parsing), Elan (for annotating audio and video recordings), and Praat
(for phonetic analysis) have all been in use and continually improved
for more than twenty years; it is strange that they are not even
mentioned.  (Rice 2014, the work that Chapter 5 summarizes, does
mention Praat and its contribution to recent grammar writing.)
The discussion of orthographic decisions for tone languages in Chapter
6 is a couple of paragraphs long, with just one citation (there are
additional citations for the more general problems of orthography
development).  But there are many articles on this topic, and it would
have been useful to discuss the pros and cons of alternative ways of
marking tone (accent marks, superscript numbers, the use of consonant
letters to mark tone, decisions on whether to mark a "neutral" tone,
etc.).  The section on orthographies finishes with the statement that
the language community must drive the decisions.  While this is true
in many situations, there are cases where it is not feasible, or at
least not the best path: the language community may not be interested,
they may not have the technical understanding of some issues (and
education levels may prevent a complete understanding), and there may
be divisions in the community over dialect or the representation of
loan words (particularly where the loan word language has a distinctly
different phonology).  It may also be important to consider that
future generations (who may not be native speakers) will need some
things to be spelled out (literally) which the current native speaker
generation finds unnecessary.
There is also no discussion of what the implications are of choosing
this or that phonological theory for the description.  This is partly
understandable; a linguist trained in a particular theory of phonology
may want to use that theory to describe a language, and in the process
show that the theory is capable of describing the phenomena.  But this
is, I would claim, exactly antithetical to the (valid!) idea espoused
throughout this book that language description should serve the
language community.  Some theories---regardless of how true they may
turn out to be---make a language description difficult to understand.
In fact, probably each theoretical development in phonology since
American Structuralism---including generative phonology with its rules
stated with phonetic features using abbreviatory notations, then
autosegmental phonology, and finally Optimality Theory---has served to
make a language description harder for a reader to understand
(although Rice 2014:86 gives an example of a grammar that illustrates
vowel deletion using "metrical trees").  Nor have we arrived at a
"final" theory of phonology (or any other linguistic discipline); so
not only lay people who may want to learn a language from its
description, but future linguists as well, may have difficulty
understanding language descriptions couched in whatever the current
theoretical framework is.  (Rice 2014:83 makes an analogous point
about the use of sound spectrograms in grammars to illustrate pitch
tracks: "...it is probably the rare person who can actually 'hear' a
spectrogram.")
Putting this point differently, the goal of a language description
should be observational adequacy, not descriptive (much less
explanatory) adequacy; and a language description should use no more
theory-based machinery than absolutely necessary.  To be sure,
phonological descriptions (and grammatical descriptions in general)
mostly adhere to this, but it does seem worth mentioning, lest
enthusiasts for this or that theory provide more theory-based
analyses.
Archiving is mentioned, in that the language descriptions mentioned as
models were archived (and the particular archives are mentioned).  But
beyond this, little is said about the need for archiving, nor how
descriptions should be prepared for archiving.  (A useful reference on
this is Bird and Simons 2003, which despite its age is still
relevant.)  Archiving might not seem terribly important to the current
generation of language speakers, who may prioritize accessibility over
preservation.  But it will (I contend) be more appreciated by future
generations, after the nicely laid out websites or smart phone apps
have died of bit rot.
Typographic errors are few.  Chapter 5 cites a paper by R. Rice; the
paper is actually by Keren Rice (2014).  A cross reference in Chapter
Six to section 1.4 should be to section 1.3.
In summary: this book reads like a manifesto for descriptive linguists
not to overlook phonology (or rather, for phonologists to be involved
in descriptive linguistics).  While there is some discussion of what a
grammar should include by way of phonology, this is really a quick
summary of Rice (2014), and for more guidance on this topic one should
really consult that work.  Similarly, for orthography decisions,
Caballero and McPherson cite the book-length work Cahill and Rice
(2014).  That work includes a chapter on orthography for tone
languages.  Snider (2022) is a book about tone languages, but includes
a chapter on the orthographic representation of tone.
For more information on current technology that supports language
analysis and description, it is perhaps best to go to the web pages
that describe Praat (https://praat.org, see also the links there to
"beginner's manuals by others"), Elan
(https://archive.mpi.nl/tla/elan), and FLEx
(https://software.sil.org/fieldworks).  (FLEx is unfortunately only
available as a Microsoft Windows program; Praat and Elan are available
as macOS, Linux and Windows programs.)  I do not know of any
up-to-date resource describing the various language archives; a web
search is perhaps the best way to find information on this.
REFERENCES
Bird, Steven, and Gary Simons. 2003.  "Seven Dimensions of Portability
for Language Documentation and Description."  Language 79 (3):
557--582.
Cahill, Michael, and Keren Rice (eds.).  2014.  Developing
Orthographies for Unwritten Languages.  Dallas: SIL International.
Pike, Kenneth. 1947.  Phonemics, a technique for reducing languages to
writing.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Pike, Kenneth. 1948.  Tone Languages: A Technique for Determining the
Number and Type of Pitch Contrasts in a Language, with Studies in
Tonemic Substitution and Fusion.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Rice, Keren. 2014. "Sounds in grammar writing."  P. 69--89 in
Toshihide Nakayama and Keren Rice (editors) Language Documentation &
Conservation Special Publication No. 8, The Art and Practice of
Grammar Writing.
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/6c1eb447-aff4-4157-a46c-292ab7e73109/content.
Snider, Keith L.  2022.  Tone Analysis for Field Linguists.  Dallas:
SIL International.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr. Maxwell is a retired researcher in computational morphology/
phonology and other computational resources for low density languages,
formerly at the Center for Advanced Study of Language (later the
Applied Research Laboratory for Intelligence and Security) at the
University of Maryland.  Before that he did research at the Linguistic
Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, and studied
endangered languages of Ecuador and Colombia with the Summer Institute
of Linguistics (now SIL International).



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