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 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.”

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.

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.