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Neutralisation and Fusion of Vocalic Phonemes in Canadian English as Spoken in the Vancouver Area1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2016

R. J. Gregg
R. J. Gregg*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

  1. 1. In the last issue of the JCLA (March 1957) I made a tentative phonetic analysis of the English spoken by the younger generation in the Vancouver area. On the basis of that analysis I propose in this article to go on to the examination of one of the problems that face us in the phonemic classification of the Vancouver vowels.

  2. 2. I should like to stress from the beginning that this problem is distributional, for whatever our views on the nature of the phoneme — whether we regard it as a concrete, practical unit, useful in the description of languages and dialects known or hitherto unknown, or whether we consider it as an abstract Platonic idea whose translation to the real world involves a series of Protean adaptations or adjustments to the phonological environment — in either case, the most important factor to be considered is distribution.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , October 1957 , pp. 78 - 83
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association. 1957

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Footnotes

1

This article is adapted from a paper read on June 13, 1957, in Ottawa at the annual conference of the C.L.A. See also JCLA 3.1 (1957) : 20-26.

References

2 I am thinking here of “phonology” in Martinet's sense, i.e. as functional phonetics.

3 For the sake of convenience these diphthongs are indicated henceforth by the symbols [e] and [o] respectively.

4 “neighbouring” from the point of view of their place of articulation.

5 See Pike, K. L. & Pike, E. V., Live Issues in Descriptive Linguistics. Glendale, Calif., 1955 : 11-12, for bibliography.

6 See Troubetzkoy, N. S., Principes de phonologie (Traduction J. Cantineau). Paris, Klincksieck, 1937 : 246 ffGoogle Scholar.

7 i.e. the English spoken in N. W. and S. W. England.

8 This neutralisation is, of course, also typical of Standard Southern British pronunciation.