With the publication of An Outline of English Structure in 1951 linguists were presented with a new phonetic analysis of English. But it was unfortunate that the authors were tempted to suggest that their work would serve as a “phonemic” analysis of English, or, at least, to allow others to interpret it in that way and to suggest that discrete phonetic items are phonematic; that is to pass off a linguistic analysis as a synthesis. In recent years the result has been that some linguists have attempted to combine the syntactical structures set out, for example, by Fries with the phonological analysis by Trager and Smith or, as in the case of Hill's Introduction to Linguistic Structures, to use an American idiolect (Hill's own) as a basis for a set of phonemes to explain English syntax in phonological terms.