In a brief declaration in the last issue of this journal, our colleagues P. Drysdale, W. Mackey and M. Scargill outlined their objections to the Smith-Trager description of English stress, pitch and juncture. Their article calls into question the most fundamental American research works in English linguistics. At the outset, we would like to observe that in adopting attitudes towards the great tradition of linguistics in the United States, it is imperative that we avoid the two extremes of total belief and of rash rejection. This tradition is the product of several decades of intense, patient research by men with eminent ability to observe sounds and patterns, and an extraordinary flair for generating verifiable hypotheses. Thus the critic can condemn any part of the tradition only when he can demonstrate that it is false. On the other hand, the American tradition is empirical and positivist. It is evolving rapidly, and its conclusions and postulates are constantly being modified. Furthermore, it is not a monolithic tradition. Though there is a consensus of views at any given time, there are also hot debates, such as the current one on the interpretation of the English vowels and suprasegmentals. Thus anyone who believes this year’s conclusions may soon find himself cherishing obsolete positions that their originators have long transcended.

Recent evidence of renewed interest in the Linguistic Atlas of Canada makes pertinent the publishing of relevant data gathered for the comparable regional atlases of the United States. To the information already published from the files of the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States there can now be added that from the collections of the Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest.

The Upper Midwest atlas, centered at the University of Minnesota, includes the five states of Minnesota, Iowa, the two Dakotas, and Nebraska. Fieldwork for the entire area, begun in 1947, has been completed, and editing of the materials is in process (though interrupted in 1958–59 by the Director’s absence abroad). Besides the records from 202 American field informants based upon personal interviews, these materials include five Canadian records and the responses for 136 lexical items on 1069 checklists returned by mail from informants in all but two of the counties in these five states. The Canadian field records were made at the suggestion of Albert H. Marckwardt of the University of Michigan, Director of the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States. In advance of future atlas organization in Canada it seemed desirable to supply at least tentative answers to questions about the relationships of Canadian and American regional English.

We are pleased that our earlier article, “Pitch and Stress As Phonemes: Analysis or Synthesis”, has produced such a spirited reply. Unfortunately, the happy conditions of proximity at the 1958 Summer School of Linguistics in Alberta which produced that article do not now exist and Professor Drysdale, Professor Mackey, and I are now so far apart in actual miles that collaboration is almost impossible. This comment is the result, then, of my own thinking: and Professor Drysdale and Professor Mackey are not aware that it has been written and, obviously, are not required to support it.

My colleagues from Toronto will agree that the greater part of their article is not an answer to the questions which we raised, but is a discussion of a further problem, the nature of plus juncture. This is relevant to our article only in the sense that it shows the danger of making ultra-positivist statements about the English suprasegmentals, the very thing that inspired our article.

The purpose of these remarks is to present a tentative classification of the syllabic phonemes in general use in eastern Newfoundland. In doing so, it will be necessary to justify making such a presentation at this early stage of enquiry, at the same time demonstrating some of the problems involved in the investigation of Newfoundland dialects.

The recent article in The Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association by Professors Robinson, Theall, and Wevers represents a pleasant and fruitful discussion of issues on which it is important to increase communication and understanding. I believe that it may also increase understanding if I point out that there was an unfortunate error in Introduction to Linguistic Structures, and that on the basis of my own statements I am quite properly taken to task for presenting ‘plus juncture’ as an inaudible “ghost phoneme”.

On p. 12 of their article, Messrs. Robinson, Theall, and Wevers quote my statement (ILS p. 26 fn. 7) “A / + / is often so short as to be below the duration (five centiseconds) which the human ear can hear. Under these circumstances what we actually do hear is the effect on the surrounding sounds.”

The structural linguist has recently begun to pay more and more attention not only to the sequences of the phonemes of a language but also to their capacity for combination. Trubetzkoy said: “La neutralisation des oppositions phonologiques est sûrement le phénomène le plus important, mais nullement le seul important dans le domaine de la théorie des combinaisons”. Much has been done on the distribution of these phonemic combinations and their functional yield, but little to determine and systematise the frequency of such occurrences, and to deduce from them some general principle. This is particularly true with reference to the consonantal clusters of the French language, though more has been done with other languages especially English.

Ideally, the grammar of a language should tell us whkh sequences of words form sentences and which sequences don’t. It is doubtful whether any existing grammar achieves this end for one of the natural languages, such as English, Russian or Chinese. However, logicians have constructed certain artificial languages (e. g. the prepositional calculus) together with a set of rules which distinguish between sentences (or well-formed formulas, as logicians prefer to call them) and non-sentences. While it is premature to attempt a complete description of English, partial grammars have been constructed.

In this paper we shall consider a fragment of English containing the names John and Jane, the verbs must, work, call, have, be, the adverb today, the conjunctions but and while and a few other words of the same types. We also admit inflected forms such as works, worked, working, etc. We shall attempt to-decide which sequences of these word-forms are sentences and which are not. Our grammar, if successful, must tell us that “John must have been calling Jane today” is a sentence, and that “John has must call Jane” is not a sentence. However, we may as well admit that many sentences will escape our net, owing to the fact that certain constructions, e. g. the gerund, will not be considered here.

Although generalizations about Canadian versus American or British English are still premature, the series of articles by Avis, Gregg, et al seems to suggest two: (1) that Canadian English “is neither American nor British, but a complex different in many respects from both…;” and (2) that “Canadian English is not so uniform as it is often made out to be”. This article is a brief contribution to the above-mentioned series and presents some evidence in support of both-assertions.

The primary source of the data on which this study is based is the writer’s idiolect. Geographically this can be identified as Central Saskatchewan, specifically the rural area surrounding the village of Herschel which lies about twenty miles west of Rosetown, and about one hundred miles southwest of Saskatoon.

Vers la fin de la seconde guerre mondiale, l’expression Krvavo connut une vogue extraordinaire sur tout le territoire de la Yougoslavie et particulièrement sur celui de l’ancien royaume de Serbie. Elle se répandit avec une rapidité stupéfiante au sein de la jeunesse des écoles moyennes, des formations militaires et, après 1944, chez la jeunesse estudiantine des universités. J’eus l’occasion d’observer personnellement la diffusion de cette expression durant les années 1945–50 et j’en fus fortement impressionné.

Il existe dans le français de Paris, par suite de certains groupements de sons, des désonorisations qui concernent uniquement les consonnes; mais jamais aucun phonéticien, à notre connaissance, n’a signalé le fait pour les voyelles. C’est que la prononciation parisienne normale accorde à tous les sons d’un mot une égale importance, quelle que soit sa position syllabique ou son entourage consonantique. La prononciation canadienne, moins attentive et moins ferme, désonorise les voyelles fermées ainsi que les semi-consonnes, menaçant, en quelque sorte, l’intégrité du mot.

L’abbé R. Charbonneau ainsi que W. N. Locke signalent le phénomène, sans en pousser l’étude plus avant. Cependant, ce dernier nous donne une indication succinte, mais très intéressante: “The high front vowels and q are sometimes whispered when they are unaccentuated and preceded by a sibilant”. Nous verrons par la suite qu’à ces sons, il faut ajouter le yod, et que les conditions phonétiques de la désonorisation ne se réduisent pas à celle qu’indique W. N. Locke.