¹ Prepared as part of the work done as Lloyd Post-Doctoral Fellow of the University of Michigan.

² Morris Swadesh, The Vowels of Chicago English, Lang. 11.148–51 (1935). Swadesh gives references to similar analyses.

³ G. L. Trager and Bernard Bloch, The Syllabic Phonemes of English, Lang. 17.223–46 (1941).

⁴ J. S. Kenyon, American Pronunciation: a textbook of phonetics for students of English⁶; Ann Arbor, 1935.

⁵ Of Glendale, Calif., with academic sessions on the campus of the University of Oklahoma.

⁶ For a full discussion of the parts of American intonation contours and for detailed illustrations, together with definitions of the meanings of these contours and frequency counts of their usage in selected bodies of text, see K. L. Pike, Intonation of American English (University of Michigan Publications in Linguistics, Vol. 1); Ann Arbor, 1945.

⁷ For references to Classe, who gives instrumental measurements of these differences, see Pike, Intonation 38 and 187. In statements of instrumental data, such as that given by C. E. Parmenter and S. N. Treviño, The Length of the Sounds of a Middle Westerner, American Speech 10.129–33 (1935), the intonation is not indicated. Otherwise such studies could be used for checking the statements given here.

⁸ Here again instrumental testing is needed. Such testing would prove valid, however, only if the sample of speech studied were actually illustrating the intonation structure here portrayed.

⁹ This sentence, like some of those given earlier, is of a contrastive type. The same principle holds for other kinds of sentences, provided that the intonation is read as written; but the contrastive type is most likely to be pronounced with the primary contour in the desired place. Note the special attention given to arrive and the lack of stress on bike in the following sentence:

[aⁱ] The bike will ar╹rive to╹morrow.

Nouns tend to be pronounced with their lexical stress reinforced by sentence stress, except in cases of special attention like this one.

¹⁰ Some time ago I presented this suggestion to W. F. Twaddell. He thought that instrumental study might be able to establish a significant difference in the range of variation between the two sets: even though neither set becomes actually monosyllabic, one set loses appreciably more of its diphthongization than the other. Compare footnote 15 below.

¹¹ Unless of course both types are completely eliminated by the substitution of an entirely different vowel, as in write [aⁱ]: written [i].

¹² Cf. Kenyon 36 and 34; Trager and Bloch, Lang. 17.235, fn. 21.

¹³ We are not here discussing dialects of southeastern American English, where the number and the nature of diphthongs are often different from the situation assumed for this paper.

¹⁴ In dialects where the vowel of bet is diphthongized as [ϵⁱ] or [ϵ^ә], this vowel has a structural similarity with the vowel of bait, [eⁱ]. In such dialects this relationship may be a further reason for treating the two sounds as parallel in phonemic structure also, and for considering each of the phonetic diphthongs to be a single phonemic unit.

In such dialects, also, it becomes clear that the first part of the diphthong [eⁱ] is not a phoneme [ϵ], since the vowels [e] and [ϵ] contrast as the differentiating characteristics of the diphthongs [eⁱ] and [ϵⁱ].

¹⁵ It is to be hoped that the new approaches through ‘Visible Speech’ may produce data that will answer some of the problems raised by this article and will test the theories propounded in it.

Note, for example, the diphthongs portrayed on p. 82 of G. A. Knopp and H. C. Green, Basic Phonetic Principles of Visible Speech, JASA 18.74–89 (July 1946). For [ai], [ɔi], [au] there is a shift of direction, quite noticeable, in the middle of the glide from the first to the second part of the diphthong; for [ei] and [ou] the glide is practically continuous. This evidence is of course inadequate, and will be greatly complicated by transitional modifications to and from other sounds. Nevertheless, we venture to propose the following hypothesis: ‘Diphthongs’ composed of two phonemes tend to show a sharp change of direction in their ‘Visible Speech’ pattern; but ‘diphthongs’ comprising single phonemes tend—when transitional modifications to and from other sounds are discounted—to show a less prominent break.

Unfortunately, the Knopp–Green article contains too little evidence to test the changes postulated here for diphthongs in precontours—first, because the range of stress differences is deliberately modified by the recording techniques so as to make weak items legible (Knopp–Green 75), and second because the phrases were not chosen to contrast sounds in different positions of a controlled intonation contour.

¹⁶ I avoid including [o^u] in this statement, since some investigators might suggest the parallel raw: row. For my own dialect, such a parallel would assume a phonemic relation between the [ɔ] in raw and the first part of the [o^u] in row—that is, between sounds that are phonetically quite different. It appears to me that such an assumption should be avoided wherever possible.

¹⁷ The first view is taken by Trager and Bloch (cf. fn. 3), the second by Swadesh, Lang. 11.148–51 (1935). I am informed that Swadesh has now written another article on the same question, with a different conclusion, which is to appear in the same issue of this journal.

¹⁸ Thus in Totonaco a sequence of vowel + glottal stop could be treated as a nuclear sequence of two phonemes which acts, in distribution, frequency, morphology, morphophonemic alternations, and dialect borrowings, much like a single vowel. The interpretation suggested here would seem to account for Aschmann's data (see Herman P. Aschmann, Totonaco Phonemes, IJAL 12.34–43 [1946]), most of which I have checked with his informant. At the same time it would account for the unitary action of the nucleus, while making the treatment of the phonetic data more satisfactory than Aschmann's analysis of [Vˀ] as a single phoneme—a laryngealized vowel.

For a detailed analysis of Mazateco from this point of view see K. L. Pike and E. V. Pike, Immediate Constituents of Mazateco Syllables, IJAL 13.78–91 (1947). In this article, various types of symbolism are developed to indicate the structural layers of phonemes; some of these might be adapted to English.