This study's objective is to identify the vibratory phase characteristics and corresponding laryngeal configurations of a series of phonation types common in current phonetic usage. The phonation types examined are categorized auditorily following the articulatory framework established by Laver (1968, 1975, 1976, 1980), the general phonetic theory of Abercrombie (1967), and the systematic nomenclature for phonation types provided by Catford (1964). The primary phonation types in this taxonomy are compared laryngographically to determine their larynx waveform characteristics, based on the auditorily controlled performance of a single phonetically trained subject, and are described visually from laryngoscopic observation. This study is intended as a means of establishing a basis for further work in which a larger inventory of speakers of known background and a wider variety of possible phonatory combinations are examined. These preliminary comparisons suggest a set of relationships between phases of the vocal fold vibratory cycle and laryngeal configuration, expressed in terms of contrasting systems of stricture, and support a number of predictions that have been made in the literature on phonatory mechanisms.

This paper is an account of facts gleaned from the auditory analysis of thirty-seven recordings made in the Department of Phonetics, University of Edinburgh, between 1949 and 1966. Every student and staff member in the Department (which was merged with the Department of Linguistics in 1967) was recorded reading a standard passage, ‘The Story of Arthur the Rat’. There were actually two versions of the story used. The earlier one, used until 1957, contains two fewer potential linking /r/s than the later version, which is that published in Abercrombie (1964).

Phonetic typesetting has always been a difficult undertaking. As long as typesetting was the business of professional typesetters, the ordinary transcriptionist did not have to worry very much about this. Today, typesetting techniques are downgraded by a variety of other textprocessing machines, ranging from electrostatic printers, or other non-impact printers that use digitized font information, to impact printers, such as print-wheel and selectric typewriters (see Hsu (1982)). It is the output of this kind of printer that can be used for camera-ready copy. Moreover, the area of influence of the author is extended since he himself has access to such textprocessing machines (see the TEX user group movement, explained below). Some years ago, most of the text-processing machines were quite inflexible; they could not cope with additional symbols or additional fonts. Early attempts to make phonological and phonetic data representable in such textprocessing systems had to accept existing symbols, and mappings between existing standard symbols (the ASCII code, for example) had to be established, sometimes on the basis of similarity (& for epsilon, for example) (see Millar/Oasa (1981), Wothke (1981), Roach (personal communication, 1981). Now that it is possible to define character sets for matrix representation (Pfeiffer-Rupp (1981a), (1982a), Neuhaus (1983)), both for printer representation and for representation on a visual display (Pfeiffer-Rupp (1981b)), it is no longer necessary to operate with such makeshift devices—which demand an additional level of coding within the same alphabet and often lead to the idea that the ASCII code is adequate for everybody's purposes, which is what the graphics industry would like to hear from us.

Like many vocalic variables which have been described for other varieties of English, Durham (eː) is correlated with a range of factors, some linguistic, others non-linguistic; in this paper, some of these correlations are presented, (eː) is one of three ‘long’ or ‘tense’ vowels which are variably realized as pure monophthongs or as opening or centring diphthongs; it is represented by words of the lexical set gate, wait, day, etc. The other two vowels are (oː), which occurs in words such as bone, goat and toe, and (ɔː), which occurs in torn, shore, etc., and variably in such items as law, walk and all (in which it alternates with /ɑː/). These three vowels probably show rather similar patterns of variation; however, in this study only (eː) will be considered.

The main facts of Roger Kingdon's biography may be found at pp. 57–8 of Vol. 1 No. 2 of this Journal of December 1971. His phonetic interests were wide. His earliest contributions to these pages, in 1939, were Specimens of ‘General South West English’ and ‘South Hams Dialect’ (pp. 9, 10) and ‘East Devon’ (p. 50). For the first of these, wishing to distinguish three kinds of r-sound, a fricative, a strong retroflex and a weak retroflex, he introduced the completely new symbol . In 1973 this form was officially adopted into the Association's alphabet. His most modest contributions to these pages were two paragraphs of Spanish (a language of which he had a truly impressive command) in narrow transcription to the Students' Corner series again in 1939 (pp. 16 and 57). In that same fateful year he published his most important contribution to Le Maître Phonétique ‘Tonetic Stress Marks for English’ (pp. 60–4) which opened up a new era in English intonation studies.

It is well known that Hong Kong has a floating population consisting mostly of fishermen. These fisherfolk call themselves the ‘boat people’ (shuishang ren literally, ‘people on water’), and upon being asked their native county, they would usually reply, “We're boat people” instead of naming a particular county in the Guangdong Province as is the usual custom. The boat people, of course, are not a homogeneous group as far as speech is concerned. The informants interviewed for the present study came from the Pu Tai Island (a small island to the southeast of Hong Kong). The children went to school on Pu Tai, while the grownups went out to sea to work for their living. About eight years ago the family gave up their boats and settled on land. The speech of this family and that of some friends who were also formerly boat people exhibit certain phonetic characteristics which are interesting departures from Modern Standard Cantonese (hereafter referred to as MSC), the dialect spoken by the majority of people in Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macau.

Until comparatively recently, the diphthong systems of southern English accents have appeared virtually symmetrical, and such an ideally symmetrical system for the closing and centring diphthongs is shown in Figures 1 and 2. (The diphthong /ɔI/, which of course does upset the symmetry, is omitted for the sake of exposition. Historically too this omission is well-motivated, as this diphthong was a borrowing from Norman French (Gimson, 1962: 132), and still has a limited distribution (Gimson, 1962: 148).)