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Linguistic Typology 2021; 25(2): 389–400 Linguistic Typology 2021; 25(2): 389–400 Book Review Easterday, Shelece. 2019. Highly complex syllable structure: A typological and diachronic study (Studies in Laboratory Phonology 9), 389 p. Berlin: Language Science Press. ISBN: 978-3-96110-194-8, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo. 3268721. https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/25953 Reviewed by Natalia Kuznetsova [nɑˈtaliə kʊznʲəˈʦovə], Faculty of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Largo Agostino Gemelli, 1, 20123 Milano, MI, Italy; and Institute for Linguistic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Tuchkov per. 9, 199053 St. Petersburg, Russia, E-mail: [email protected] https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2020-2066 Although this book was published in the “Studies in Laboratory Phonology” series, you will find hardly any laboratory phonologyinit.Instead,youwilldiscoverplentyof excellent phonological typology intertwined with historical phonology — probably amuchrarerfind. Until very recently, phonological typology was only marginally present within mainstream linguistic typology, being barely recognised as a subfield in its own right. The last few years have seen a gradual change: two synthesising volumes, both entitled Phonological Typology, have appeared (Gordon 2016; Hyman and Plank 2018) and the first workshop on this topic was held at ALT 2019 (Grossman and Moran 2019). At that meeting, the very first Greenberg Award (a prize of the Association for Linguistic Typology for outstanding typological dissertations) was given out in phonology — anditwenttothethesisonwhichthepresentbookisbased. The task of reviewing the resulting volume is both pleasant and challenging: this open-access volume appears as a new landmark in typological studies on syllable structure and a sine qua non for future research in the field. The main part (326 pages) of the work is arranged into eight chapters followed by two appendices with a full typological database which formed the basis for the study (220 pages). The primary object of study is Highly Complex Syllable Structure (HCSS): syllabic margins containing ≥3 obstruents or ≥4 of any consonants, to which the book presents a holistic rather than a partial typological approach (viz. Himmelmann 2000). HCSS is analysed in connection with other aspects of language structure: sound inventories, word-prosodic units, vowel reduction processes, the complexity of inflection. Moreover, a significant part of the book is devoted to a detailed multidimensional comparison of the four types of syllabic structure distinguished by the author, where the HCSS represents just one type along with the simple, moderately complex, and complex syllable structure. Chapter 1 “Syllables and syllable structure” sets the theoretical and typolog- ical scene with a thorough overview of theoretical models of the syllable and cross- Open Access. © 2020 Natalia Kuznetsova [nɑˈtaliə kʊznʲəˈʦovə], published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 390 Book Review linguistic trends in its composition. The notion of the syllable has had a long life in linguistics, but the principal scheme of its internal structure has remained nearly unchanged since the 1940s (e.g. Kuryłovicz 1948). However, as the author points out, the syllable eludes precise definition and has no cross-linguistically consis- tent phonetic, phonological, or physiological correlates. Several points stand out in the choice of HCSS as the main object of the study. One reason is a sociolinguistic one: the endangered status of many languages with HCSS. This is in line with one of the latest trends in phonetic and phonological studies: a search for new theo- retical inputs in understudied languages (Tucker and Wright 2020; Whalen and McDonough 2019). Another reason answers to a current trend in typology: making it more geographically and historically grounded (the “what’s where why?” of Bickel 2007, 2015). The book offers an insight into the paths of emergence of HCSS and reflects on its stability over time. The third and fourth reasons are especially remarkable: the cross-linguistic rarity of highly complex syllables and their theoretical marginalisation due to various issues they create for analysis within existing frameworks. Rare features can challenge theories in a particularly efficient way, and a specific interest to- wards them arose in typology from the beginning of the 2000s (Golovko et al. 2015; Plank 2000; Simon and Wiese 2011; Wohlgemuth and Cysouw 2010a, 2010b). Two types of rarities have been distinguished: absolute rarities and those features which are rare worldwide but frequent in certain genetic groupings. HCSS belongs to the first type, although some genealogical and areal biases in its distribution can be observed (e.g. towards the Caucasus and the Pacific Northwest and away from the equator, p. 29). Rarities can be ignored by a general theory, re-analysed as regular, or incor- porated by changing the theory (Simon and Wiese 2011: 9–14). While previous accounts of HCSS chose one of the first two methods, the volume in question chooses rather the latter approach. Originally, rarities were seen as something unnatural with respect to the “natural” laws of language. This book is a shining example of a recent tendency towards their de-exoticisation by expanding the theory (other examples in phonology include Anderson 2016; Blevins 2018; Kuznetsova 2018). The trend could be linked, first, to the exponential rise of research on the evolutionary aspect of both universals and rarities, attempts to explain them through the typical paths of their emergence or disappearance (Blevins 2004, 2015; Round 2019). Second, rarities, for various reasons, are often concentrated in lesser-studied languages (e.g. Mithun 2007; Mansfield and Stan- ford 2017; Jäger, forthcoming), which are progressively coming under investigation and changing our understanding of what is rare or typical, possible or impossible. The third factor is a spread of parametric methods in typology and a shift from languages as the minimal units of analysis to the features of languages, and further Book Review 391 to the parameters of these features. Multidimensional approaches include Canonical Typology (e.g. Corbett 2007; Hyman 2014; Round and Corbett 2020) and Multivariate (or Distributional) Typology (e.g. Bickel 2015; Tallman 2020). Pre- senting marginal cases as possible but rare combinations of universal parameters rather than logically impossible cases also favours their de-exoticisation. Chapter 2 “Language sample” thoroughly describes the principles and the composition of the typological sample of the study, given in Appendix A “Language sample” and B “Data”. The sample is intended to be big enough for meaningful quantitative analysis but small enough to enable in-depth qualitative study, and as balanced as possible in terms of genealogical and geographic biases and the proportions of each of the four distinguished syllable complexity groups. The author has generally succeeded in these tasks, although a perfect balance was apparently unviable given the rarity not only of HCSS but also of simple syllable structure. For example, the simple category in her sample lacks languages from Eurasia altogether and includes fewer languages from North America while more from Southeast Asia as compared to the highly complex category of the sample. Easterday also addresses the third important bias which could not be entirely avoided: the literary or sociolinguistic one, whereby big literary languages with a long tradition of study are compared to small rural under-described languages. Complex syllables structures are concentrated in the latter group, which, according to the author, is also one of the reasons for their theoretical marginalisation. The whole sample comprises 100 languages, which is less than is usual in typological databases but more than is usual in samples on rarities, cf. e.g. 55 examples of non-modal vowels in Gordon (1998) or 13 language groupings on minimal vowel systems in Anderson (2016). Small databases are also used when the author is not interested in cross-linguistic frequencies (Himmelmann 2000), rather focusing on a very detailed, often holistic study, cf. 15 languages in Corbett (2003) or 40 in Nedjalkov (2007). The medium-sized database of the present vol- ume seeks to mediate between the qualitative and the quantitative demands of typological research. Chapters 3–7 contain core quantitative studies on the sample. Each of them starts with a list of hypotheses, proceeds with testing of these hypotheses, and discusses the results. Chapter 3 examines the syllable structures themselves, while the following three chapters contribute to the holistic nature of this study by investigating other phonological properties possibly correlating with the syllabic complexity: phonemic inventories, lexical prosody and vowel reduction. Chapter 7 explores the dynamic phonetic processes which could have led to the emergence of these associations. The most important findings of these chapters are outlined below. 392 Book Review Chapter 3 “Syllable structure patterns in sample” discusses the phonotactic, distributional, and phonetic properties of the attested syllable structures. An in-depth analysis focuses only on those properties which may correlate with other linguistic features or shed light on the development of HCSS. Some features were studied across the whole sample in a confirmatory manner. The following hypotheses were tested
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