In a well-known introductory text on linguistics, Langacker maintained (1968: 161), expressing a widely held view:

Linguists do not fully understand just what constitutes stress. The best we can say is that stressed vowels are apparently different from unstressed ones in that they are of greater length, higher pitch and greater articulatory force.

The unstressed high vowels /i/ and /u/ are subject to extreme shortening, devoicing, or elision in certain environments in standard modern Greek. This process goes on below the consciousness of most native speakers in their own speech; however, they will recognize it in speakers of northern Greek dialects where unstressed /i/ and /u/ are frequently elided (see Newton, 1972; Papadopoulos, 1926). In the phonology of the language, vowel reduction and elision are treated as a collection of optional ‘fast speech’ rules (e.g. Theophanopoulou-Kontou, 1973). In this study, they are considered as related stages in the same phonetic process, which will be described from both an auditory and acoustic point of view. An analysis of read texts and spontaneous speech samples by a number of educated speakers from Athens and Thessalonika shows that vowel reduction is not purely optional, but depends on a number of factors, the most important of which are phonetic environment and position relative to the stressed syllable. Some hypotheses concerning the phonetic motivation for this kind of vowel reduction will then be discussed.

An experiment is reported which investigates the acceptability for English speakers of various syntactic constructions in conjunction with labels for voices (Laver, 1974). A regularity is observed in the co-occurrence possibilities; subjects differentiate between labels for temporal aspects of speech (tempo, continuity and rhythmicality) and for non-temporal (pitch, loudness and quality) in terms of the constructions which may accompany them. No purely syntactic motivation is found for this regularity and it is suggested instead that it is indicative of a basic phonetic difference between cognitively governed temporal parameters in speech and physiologically determined non-temporal parameters. This view is supported by examples from other languages.

This study comes in two parts; first, we consider a range of potential intonation contrasts in isolated utterances, and in part 2, we analyse the intonation used in connected text. The study is based on data and observations collected by Miller in Northern Nigeria and by informants in Cardiff, and further research conducted by Tench, during a visit to Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Northern Nigeria, where both printed and recorded materials were made available at the Kashim Ibrahim Library.

One of the major non-native accents of English is what for convenience of reference we shall call Panjabi English (PE)—the English spoken by educated Panjabi speakers (for Panjabi see Gill & Gleason, 1962). This accent has assumed a certain importance over the last two decades because of the settlement of a large number of Panjabi speakers from India and Pakistan in various English-speaking countries, chiefly Britain. Nevertheless, it has not attracted much attention from the linguist. One possible reason for this neglect is that many linguists hold the view that there can be no ‘system’ in a non-native variety of a language, which, they may contend, is the result of an attempt to imitate, with varying degrees of inefficiency, some native variety of the language (though now at several generations' remove).

We have all heard of the remote community in the Appalachians (or is it somewhere in the North of England ?) where the locals still supposedly speak pure Elizabethan English, unchanged for centuries. But this is not the only dialectological myth which persists tenaciously in the popular imagination and will no doubt continue to do so despite its lack of factual basis.