The renowned historical linguist Hans Henrich Hock once commented that, for reasons that are not well understood, there sometimes appear "curious gaps" in the bilabial slot of languages' series of obstruent phonemes. Hock based his comment on the observation that if a language lacks a voiceless stop at one of the cardinal points of articulation, the missing segment is almost always /p/. Labial Instability in Sound Change (Explanations for the loss of /p/) explains the driving force behind this phenomenon. The theory advanced by the book accounts for why, over time, languages lose the /p/ sound more often than any other voiceless stop (sounds of a similar class). The book describes the phenomenon of "labial instability" in articulatory and acoustic terms. Labial Instability in Sound Change argues for a particular school of sound change (John Ohala's phonetic theory) while clarifying the complex relationships among speech perception, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, language typology, and sound change.

Phonetics - the study and classification of speech sounds - is a major sub-discipline of linguistics. Bringing together a team of internationally renowned phoneticians, this handbook provides comprehensive coverage of the most recent, cutting-edge work in the field, and focuses on the most widely-debated contemporary issues. Chapters are divided into five thematic areas: segmental production, prosodic production, measuring speech, audition and perception, and applications of phonetics. Each chapter presents an historical overview of the area, along with critical issues, current research and advice on the best practice for teaching phonetics to undergraduates. It brings together global perspectives, and includes examples from a wide range of languages, allowing readers to extend their knowledge beyond English. By providing both state-of-the-art research information, and an appreciation of how it can be shared with students, this handbook is essential both for academic phoneticians, and anyone with an interest in this exciting, rapidly developing field.

The volume provides a comprehensive overview of the history of English and explores key questions and debates. A re-evaluation of the concept of periodization is followed by overviews of changes in the traditional linguistic areas – phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics – and chapters on prosody, idioms, fixed expressions, onomastics, orthography, register, and standardization, among others.