The Jakobsonian system of binary distinctive features is based on the premise that, as far as vowels are concerned, their articulation, and the resulting acoustic effects, are not distributed randomly over the available articulatory or acoustic space, but are organized into systems of binary contrasts, so that for example (in articulatory terms) a set of front vowels will be matched by a corresponding set of back vowels, a set of high vowels by a set of mid or low vowels, and so on. There will thus be a certain symmetry in the distribution of such vowels, either in their positions on a vowel quadrilateral, or in a similar schematic shape such as the five-vowel triangle.

Venetian shows great vitality. In everyday life it is used by almost everybody: not only the general population but also physicians, lawyers, and teachers speak it regularly. It is estimated that it has at least 100,000 speakers.

With the corpus organized in the way described in the first part of this article (JIPA 4.2, December 1974) it was possible to move on to the main objective, namely the extraction of a system of intonation from the corpus. In the present work it was a fundamental requirement of the eventual system of intonation that it should account for all the intonation patterns observable in the corpus. It is suggested that this system provides a very adequate means of describing the intonation of modern colloquial Russian in the broader context, although it is not, of course, possible within the limits of this article to test that proposition. If the system is to be descriptive of the intonation of Russian in the widest sense it seems essential that as few assumptions as possible should be made about what is and what is not functional in an intonation system. The problems involved in setting up and testing hypotheses about the function of intonation are considerable, and the only assumption made in this work is that perceivably different intonation patterns could have different functions in the conversational situation—the definition of those functions is not a necessary part of the task here. Given this approach it follows that an intonation system is not regarded as comparable to a phonemic system, in which a relatively small set of functional units will be realized in a very large number of different but not necessarily contrastive ways. Rather it is viewed here as a very much larger set, graded in terms of probability of occurrence.

The dominance within the EFL world of the Jones transcription system (DJ), as in the EPD (Jones, 1967), has been seriously challenged by the adoption of the new Windsor Lewis system (WL) in the Concise Pronouncing Dictionary (Lewis, 1972a) and the new edition of the ALD (Hornby, 1974). This issue (recently discussed in, e.g., Lewis, 1972b, and Walsh, 1974) is likely to remain a lively one at least until the appearance of the simplified Gimson system in the next edition of the EPD ; meanwhile there are other systems that have some claim to use in EFL teaching, e.g. those in Gimson (1970) (G), Abercrombie (1964), and the Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics (Allen and Corder, 1974/1975).

In ‘Linking /r/ in the General British Pronunciation of English’ by J. Windsor Lewis (JIPA 5.1) the author expressed his view that ‘linking’ and ‘intrusive’ r can be regarded as one and the same thing, that both are regular practice in current usage, and that therefore foreigners ought to be taught to use both ‘irrespective of traditional orthography’. My purpose is to show that he does not make a convincing case with the evidence he puts forward.