The aim of this essay is to argue that English intonation has broadly two functions. On the one hand it picks out a particular item or items in every sentence in order to give it or them semantic prominence; on the other hand, the pitch CONTOUR of an utterance also contributes to meaning and this contribution may itself be divided into two types: firstly, the height of pitch and the degree of its variation in a given utterance reflect speakers' ‘involvement’ or ‘interest’, and, secondly, the direction of the pitch contour towards or away from a neutral low pitch indicates the degree of ‘completeness’ or ‘incompleteness’ of an utterance in a discourse. I shall argue that the division of intonation into these two main subparts, an ‘accent’ function corresponding to what Halliday calls ‘tonicity’ and an ‘attitude’ function corresponding to Halliday's ‘tone’, is valid since it correlates with the division of meaning analysis into semantics and pragmatics.

Polish is a consonant language. On one phonemic analysis (Biedrzycki, 1974: 35) it has thirty-one consonants and six vowels. The main factor contributing to the richness of the Polish consonant system is the range of grooved frictionals; each fricative has a corresponding affricate and vice versa, each voiced frictional has a corresponding voiceless frictional and vice versa.

Laurie Bauer seems to have let his imagination run away with him (Bauer, 1979). On the one hand, he has been misled by the similarity of phenomena in a number of accents of English into thinking that there is a common vowel shift in progress. On the other hand, he has been too selective and somewhat undiscriminating in his choice of corroborating evidence.

In their book on British English accents and dialects, Hughes & Trudgill (1979: 51–3) include a brief study of the South Wales variety of English, based on the speech of informants from Neath and Pontypridd. Although in the main their description rings true, it does leave some gaps and contain some inaccuracies, sufficient to prompt me to offer the following, somewhat fuller notes on the South Welsh pronunciation of English, with particular reference to the speech of my native West Glamorgan (WG). My comments relate primarily to the Port Talbot variety of WG, but since this variety is similar in most respects to those found in nearby Neath and Swansea and their surrounding areas, my remarks may, for the most part, be taken as applying to WG speech in general. The accents found in the adjoining south-western part of the county of Mid Glamorgan, in towns such as Maesteg or Porthcawl, are also similar to the Port Talbot variety, and thus share most of the characteristics attributed here to WG speech.

One of the challenges of current research into speech communication is that of effectively using the power of the digital computer to both organize data and to extract relevant relationships by computational methods. Whilst considerable progress has been made in the analysis and synthesis of the acoustics of speech and in understanding the perceptual mechanisms at work in human perception of speech, there has been a paucity of relations between such knowledge and the description of speech by the traditional discipline of phonetics. One significant factor in this situation is the lack of an effective way for the speech scientist to code the descriptions of the phonetician in a way that preserves the richness of description and accuracy of judgement attained by a highly trained ear and expressed in specialized phonetic scripts. It is the intent of this paper to propose a tool that could provide improved communication between the two disciplines.

There are fourteen pure oral vowels in one of the several colloquial dialects of Tamil. On the basis of the author's proprioception and on the basis of a detailed spectrographic study, these were classified as front /i:, i, e:, ε/, back /ɑ:, ɑ, o:, o, u:, u/ and central /ə:, ə, ɨ:, ɨ/. X-rays were taken of the tongue-positions of ten of these vowels. These ten vowels are /i:, i, e:, ɑ:, ɑ, o:, o, u:, u, ə:, ɨ:/.

C. E. Capell's article ‘Transcription, Vowel and Consonant Systems of Upper Bavarian Dialect’, in JIPA, vol. 9, no. 1 (June 1979), was interesting as being one of the very few contributions in English to the study of this phonologically fascinating German dialect, but was unfortunately so full of straightforward errors of data and interpretation that it gravely misrepresents the dialect. The following article is an attempt to set the record straight in all but a few very minor points.

A universal concerning the origin of syllabic consonants is proposed by Bell, 1978: 165. This says that ‘the syllabicity of syllabic consonants never arises spontaneously from a marginal consonant, as far as I can ascertain. The source of syllabicity is always a vowel’. Certain apparently contradictory data in English ([elm] < elm) are adduced, but following Dobson, 1968, Bell (167) assumes an intermediate stage with shwa (eləm). There is evidence in Dobson that spellings with a vowel letter are indeed earlier than (for instance) Bullokar's capitalized consonant letters representing syllabic consonants. It seems to me, though, that we need to make a reservation about the assumption of the priority of svarabhakti over syllabization.