ENGLISH VOWEL PHONOLOGICAL RULES On the utili

On the utility of phonological rules

Gleason (1960) well remarked that the term rules in phonology is "open to misinterpretation to such an extent that many linguists studiously avoid using it at all. The trouble arises from the fact that many people have expected 'grammar' to tell them how a language 'ought' to be spoken" (p. 88). Indeed, a legislative type of grammar is of very questionable value to a person who speaks the language, and absolutely worthless to a learner.

Nevertheless, Ladefoged (1982) has chosen to list a set of rules describing the allophones, even though he warns that "they are not the kind of rules that prescribe what people ought to do. Like most phoneticians, I would not presume to set myself up as an arbiter of fashion and declare what constitutes 'good' speech" (p. 83).

In light of the lack of prescriptive rules, of the practicality of writing them, and of the extremely large variations in values given English sounds, even by well-educated native English speakers, one may wonder about the utility, for others than academic linguists, of delving into descriptive rules which are quite complicated, numerous, and of little if any practical application.

The realization of any phoneme differs according to the context in which it occurs. The influence of the phonetic features of a segment on the production of an adjacent segment is a matter of co-articulatory effects. The same types of allophonic variations, involvin