Linguistic Society of America

Some Questions of English Phonology: A Reply

Author(s): Hans Kurath
Source: Language, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1958), pp. 259-260
Published by: Linguistic Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/410829
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SOME QUESTIONS OF ENGLISH PHONOLOGY

A REPLY
HANS KURATH

University of Michigan
The Editor has invited me to comment briefly on James Sledd's criticisms of
my two recent papers in LANGUAGE.It seems that Sledd finds little in either of
my papers that he can accept without reservation, although he passes over in
silence some of the most important points I make. Without any explicit commitment on his part concerning such matters, some of his comments are hard to
evaluate. But I shall try, taking them in sequence.
1.1. I assume that the OE infinitive settan is morphologically /sett-an/ since
it falls into the pattern of /lset-an, brec-an, sing-an/, etc., and that the OE
preterits redde, mette, sette are /raed-de, met-te, set-te/ because they pattern like
/del-de, kep-te/, etc. The alternative to this analysis of such preterits is to
posit a morpheme /-e/ as synonymous with the allomorphs /-ede, -de, -te/,
which I do not accept. The hyphen that I use in writing complex forms is not
a phoneme; there is no overt feature within these forms to signal the morphological break. To the speaker or reader, the clues for the interpretation of such
an OE expression as sette-either as /sett-e/, pres. subj. sing. 3, or as /set-te/,
pret. subj. sing. 3-come from the context.
1.2. I have nothing to add to what I said in my paper. If any equally satisfactory account of the origin of contrastive voiceless and voiced fricatives in
Middle English has been offered elsewhere, I am unaware of it. I therefore
reject Sledd's undocumented statement that 'other explanations are necessary
(and of course available)' as unfounded.
1.3. Sledd is obviously right: OE seolh, feorh have /h/. But this fact has no
bearing on the problem that my statement leads up to.
2. Sledd misreads the title of my paper. The article the in the title is as unambiguous here as in the expression the Protestant church (a class of denominations distinct from the Catholic). In my paper I discuss, in fact, two specimens
of the type of interpretation that I call 'binary'.
3. Sledd objects to my statement that /h/ 'is unquestionably a fricative'.
I think that the arguments which I present to support this decision are very
strong. /h/ is certainly not a semivowel. If it were taken as unique, that would
shock me less than the Bloch-Trager-Smith type of binary interpretation of the
English diphthongal syllabics (complex nuclei).
4. I should not wish to argue the case of balm vs. bomb without specific objective evidence. Meanwhile the evidence on phonic vowel length referred to in
my article (113 fn. 3) remains unchallenged.
6. The hitch is in the term 'transcription'. Does it mean 'notation of identified
phonemes' or something else? 'Simplicity of analyses' is a vague criterion indeed.
6. In citing the rather small number of diphthongal phonemes or 'complex
nuclei' identified by Bloomfield and Trager in their English, I had no intention
259

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LANGUAGE, VOLUME 34, NUMBER 2 (1958)

of denying that other dialects of American English may have a larger number.
The context of my statement makes that perfectly clear.
7. Sledd asks what I mean by 'system' in fn. 6 of my article, although it
seems to me that my statement permits of only one interpretation. I hold that
not every single feature occurring in a given idiolect or dialect at a given time is
part and parcel of its system. Fragments of alien systems, relics of an older
system of the same idiolect or dialect, and innovations deviating from the current system are always present. To treat such oddities as part of the system
and to use them as 'structure points' is, in my opinion, fundamentally wrong.
The observant analyst must separate the unsystematized from the systematized
features, otherwise he creates a fictitious system for the sake of a preconceived
theory. Glottotechnics (structural linguistics) has an important place in linguistics, but it cannot set aside or invalidate the findings of historical, social,
and areal linguistics.
8. The answer to Sledd's query probably is that the /h/ in Bloch and Trager's
law, lamb, etc., is an afterthought,l and not a very happy one. See my comment
in Lg. 33.119, last paragraph.

9. My treatment of the vowels before tautosyllabic /r/ (or its derivative

/a/) in the major dialects spoken in the Eastern United States, which I hope
to send to press before long, will furnish the data which alone can lead to a
profitable discussion of this problem. I shall present the phonic data along with
the phonemicization that I have adopted.
I am rather surprised that Sledd charges me with advocating an 'overall
pattern'. I don't, and have explicitly rejected it as a 'spurious notion' in Lg.
33.120 fn., last paragraph. I am glad that Sledd has 'grown sceptical of every
overall pattern for American English' he has seen.
In compliance with the Editor's request I have tried to be brief in my comments. Some fundamental differences in theory, in method, and in the conception
of the interrelations between the various branches of linguistics are involved in
this controversy. The cause of English phonology will, in my opinion, be best
served if James Sledd and I continue to pursue separate courses for some time to
come. The accumulation of precise phonic data, such as Sledd presents for one
sector of his own dialect-data that can be subjected to analyses from different
points of view-is for the time being the most urgent need.
1[As a matter of historical fact this is wrong. The postvocalic /h/ in words of this kind
figured in our earliest discussions of the problem.-BB]