Structural Dialectology: A Proposal

t. The notions outlined here were developed in a graduate seminar at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the spring of 1958. The members of the class were Tommy R. Anderson, Ralph Goodman, Julianne Hitt, Robert Nussbaum, Jane Robinson, and Paul Schachter. This article is the result of collaboration with them. Professors A. A. Hill, Martin Joos, Noam Chomsky, and Sumner Ives were kind enough to read this paper in a prepublication version and to make critical suggestions, which we acknowledge with appreciation. I owe to Chomsky my awareness that the notion of 'over-all pattern' for English is no more than a subpattern of some general phonetics grid that must be assumed to be reflected in the capacity of children to learn any language equally well. 7. Brief remarks may be made about the prehistory of the analysis itself. The terminal junctures are the contributions of Trager and Smith, as well as the integration of the whole system, in An Outline of English Structure, Studies in Linguistics, OP 3 (1951). The nine vowels were proposed by Morris Swadesh, 'On the Analysis of English Syllabics,' Language, XXIII (i947), 137-51. The four pitches go back to Rulon S. Wells, 'The Pitch Phonemes of English,' Language, XXI (1945), 27-39, and to Kenneth L. Pike, The Intonation of American English (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1945). The four stresses date at least from Trager and Bernard Bloch, 'The Syllabic Phonemes of English,' Language, XVII (i941), 223-46, where the plus juncture also first appeared in its present form. The concept of the superfix, a phrase-binding combination of stress elements, is derived (with important modifications by Trager) from Wells, 'Immediate Constituents,' Language, XXIII (1947), 8'-1i17. The distribution of stress phonemes in polysyllabic words and constructs was clarified by Stanley S. Newman, 'On the Stress System of English,' Word, 11 (1946), 171-87, though he worked with only three phonemic stresses. The postvocalic /h/ is Trager and Bloch, oc. cit.; the analysis of postvocalic front and back glides as glide phonemes different from the highfront and high-back vowels goes back, in recent times, through Bloomfield, Language (New York, 1933) and 'Stressed Vowels of American English,' Language, XI (1935), 97-I i6, at least to Henry Sweet, A History of English Sounds (Oxford, 1888). A major contribution to understanding the problems in the analysis of complex nuclei was Hockett's 'Short and Long Syllabic Nuclei,' International Journal of American Linguistics, XIX (1953), 165-71. The breakdown of the nine vowels into distinctive features is A. A. Hill's, Introduction to Linguistic Structures (New York, I958), as well as the full analysis of English phonotactics within this frame of reference. Details on the analysis of suprasegmental features have been contributed from time to time by William E. Welmers, Spoken English as a Foreign Language (r953), James Sledd, 'Superfixes and Intonation Patterns,' Litera, III (1956), 35-41, Charles F. Hockett, Manual of Phonology (Baltimore, 1955), Hill, loc. cit., Stockwell, 'On the Analysis of English Intonation' (Texas Conference, 1957, to be published), and Martin Joos (also at the 1957 Texas Conference). Problems in the analysis of vowels have been raised recently by Sledd in a review of Trager and Smith, Language, XXXI (I955), 3 12-46, and by Raven McDavid and Sumner Ives, along with Sledd, at the 1956 Texas Conference (papers to be published). McDavid, in a chapter of W. Nelson Francis's The Structure of American English (New York, 1958), has called attention to the same problems again in passing. Earlier, Haugen and Twaddell brought up similar problems ('Facts and Phonem-