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.

The type of analysis best suited to intonation (what Stockwell, 1972, calls the ‘representation’ question) is not under discussion in this article. In order to save taking up space with such analytical preliminaries, Belfast intonation is described in this article largely in a framework similar to that of Halliday (1967). We describe firstly the forms of intonation in that dialect; then the use of such forms; and end with some implications for linguistics in general. The analysis is based on recordings of the speech of an educated speaker of an urban Anglo-Irish dialect of Belfast. The main findings were checked by reference to a second speaker of the same dialect.

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.

The subject under discussion is a style of pronunciation which phoneticians have never completely agreed in labelling: ‘familiar’ (Windsor Lewis, 1969: 36; O'connor, 1971: vii); ‘rapid familiar’ (Jones, 1956: 13); ‘quick colloquial’ (Ward, 1939: 198), and ‘rapid colloquial’ or ‘rapid familiar’ (Gimson, 1962: 302). For O'connor the terms ‘familiar’ and ‘colloquial’ even indicate two different styles.

The aim of this paper is to discuss certain non-obvious assimilation processes which take place at word boundaries. They are ‘non-obvious’ because it appears that the assimilation changes are not necessarily complete, i.e. rules apply partially producing transition segments which have some features of the original segment and some of the one which triggers off assimilation. This phenomenon is given the name FEATURE INVASION and is illustrated primarily by Polish examples and marginally by examples from English RP.

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).

The eagerly awaited revision of the Association's Principles will no doubt incorporate a less controversial statement than the present (paragraph 11) remark that THEpositions ofTHEtongue in the articulation of cardinal [i, a, α] and [u] have been determined. The old form of diagram introduced by Daniel Jones, and still surviving as the only official IPA shape must surely be now discarded. Its form implied excessive optimism both about the universality of the applicability of the X-ray photography data on which it was based, and about its practical usefulness. It can only be said to have flourished for about the decade 1919–29. Since the early ‘thirties it has been overwhelmingly rejected in favour of Jones's second choice, which many would perhaps be surprised to hear has as yet absolutely no explicit official IPA sanction. This seems to have first appeared in 1929 in Ida Ward's The Phonetics of English. Jones himself never made use of the present official IPA diagram in any new or fully re-written book after 1932 not even in The Phoneme. So far as one knows he never formally abandoned it but his discarding of it seems to leave little doubt that he himself would have been in sympathy with authorization in the new edition of the de facto current version. If anyone still considers the older version preferable it would be very interesting to hear their arguments and to hear of any evidence on the basis of which such an opinion were held. Now is clearly the time for speaking up on this topic.

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.

The following suggestions emerge from my paper read at the Eighth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences and recapitulate proposals made at the meeting of the International Phonetic Association held in connection with that Congress.