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System Status of Obscured Vowels in English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

Lee S. Hultzén
Lee S. Hultzén*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Ohio State University
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Abstract

In the introduction to their recent book on eastern American dialects, Kurath and McDavid have a short section headed ‘Vowels in Unstressed and Weakly Stressed Syllables’. The first sentence is: ‘All dialects of American English have a free vowel /ə/ that occurs only in unstressed syllables.‘ The question here is whether or not it is proper or advantageous or both to include in a phonemic inventory of English such a vowel or possibly more than one. The alternative to something like /ə/ restricted to occurrence in unaccented syllables is of course identification of every vowel appearing in an unaccented syllable with one or another of the vowels appearing in accented syllables.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 37 , Issue 4-Part1: October-December , December 1961, pp. 565 - 569
Copyright
Copyright © 1961 Linguistic Society of America

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References

1 The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic states 8–9 (Ann Arbor, 1961).

2 American pronunciation 10 29 (Ann Arbor, 1950); Outline of English phonetics 9 95 (New York, 1956).

3 An outline of English structure 39–41 (SIL Occasional Papers 3, 1951). All references below are also to this section.

4 A course in modern linguistics 22–3, 339–49 (New York, 1958).

5 On accent and juncture in English, For Roman Jakobson 74 (The Hague, 1956).

6 Essentially the text of about 20,000 phonemes analyzed by Carroll and reported in Progress report on Project 52, Transitional probabilities of English phonemes (duplicated; Cambridge, 1952). There are trivial differences in count as used for a further analysis by Hultzén, Allen, and Miron, which is expected to appear shortly.

7 Many items in this and the following list are from Kenyon, Am. pron. 10 96–101. There can be no question as to the pronunciation with obscured vowel or syllabic consonant; every item cited here is attested for both English and America English and every item cited elsewhere for American, all but a few also for English. Alternative pronunciations are unimportant.

8 Jones, The phoneme 56–62 (Cambridge, 1950) ; Kenyon, Am. pron. 10 29.

9 Sounds and prosodies, Transactions of the Philological Society 1948, reprinted in Papers in linguistics 1984–1951 138, 122 (London, 1957).

10 Ibid. 121.

11 So specified in the 1958–59 lecture notes for the Ordinary Course in Phonetics, which is emphatically phonemic in orientation.

12 For a discussion of the phonetic question see my article Vowel quality in unstressed syllables in American English, Quarterly journal of speech 29.451–7 (1943).

13 Kenyon treats this vowel exactly as he does schwa: Am. pron. 10 29. Cf. my Symbol for the nonsyllabic postvocalic r of General American, Quarterly journal of speech 36.189–201 (1950).

14 The Edinburgh school has respectively three, two, and a different and differently distributed three members in the minor system in unstressed syllables for the English of Scotland, England, and America.