The plans for the Convention for the revision of the Association's alphabet are proceeding well; anyone wishing to attend who has not yet sent in a preregistration form should contact me at the above address as soon as possible. Coordinators of the different interest groups have been appointed as shown on the list below. They are all preparing preliminary reports, some of which are being published or summarized in this issue of the Journal. Members of the Association who sent in a preregistration form before September 1988 should have heard from the coordinators of the groups in which they expressed an interest. Anyone else who has material that should be considered at the Convention is urged to contact the appropriate coordinator as soon as possible. A complete list of names and addresses follows this note. The more discussion we can have before the meeting, the better it will be.

As part of the preparation for the meeting on the revision of the International Phonetic Alphabet, I have been asked to write a short summary of my correspondence with a number of members of the Association on the principles on which the alphabet should be based. To this end, I have sought the views of the 34 respondents who gave first or second rank to this topic on the preregistration form for the 1989 Convention.

This paper summarizes the discussion which has taken place up to December 1988 in preparation for the Vowel group at the Association's Convention to be held in Kiel in August 1989. As coordinator of the Vowel group I sent out a questionnaire to those prospective participants who, on their pre-registration form, had listed vowel classification as being among their first five interests. Thirty-eight questionnaires were dispatched, and 24 responses were received by shortly after the deadline specified. Allowing for one case where the participant was ‘not known’ at the address listed, and possibly a couple of other questionnaires going variously astray, this relatively high rate of return within the short time-span available must reflect the importance with which this topic is viewed.

The focus of interest for the working group on Suprasegmental Categories – like that of other groups working on ‘the phonetic theory that the symbols represent’ – should primarily be on theoretical considerations. A main objective would therefore be to come up with a set of categories to be symbolized within the IPA framework. As a first step in this direction I have as the coordinator of the group devised a tentative list of such suprasegmental categories to be discussed within the working group. In a circular letter accompanying the list of suprasegmental categories I expressed the opinion that suprasegmentals within the IPA framework are not primarily in need of revision but rather addition. Another issue addressed in this letter is the question of the level of abstraction on which symbolization should take place for suprasegmental categories like stress and prominence relations as well as boundary signals, which seem to have a complex cueing with several phonetic correlates. I also expressed the possibility that the increasing number of discourse studies and studies of spontaneous speech may also call for an extension of symbols for suprasegmental categories that are not met in read speech and monologue and are not traditionally considered to be linguistic.

The International Phonetic alphabet (IPA) has been standardized and published in two main forms: the one in The Principles of the International Phonetic Association (1949) and the one in the revised chart issued in 1979. A further revision, perhaps quite radical, may be expected at some point after the 1989 Convention in Kiel. I am concerned here with general questions about the way the IPA as it presently exists should be presented to consumers.

In preparation for the IPA Kiel Convention in 1989, this report summarizes preliminary discussions of possible improvements and changes to individual symbols and diacritics in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It details responses to a questionnaire sent out on 22 October 1988. Specific questions were suggested by a number of sources: my own paper (Henton 1987), reactions to that paper, and from discussions with other phoneticians. The questionnaire was written with a view to eliciting simple and democratic input, rather than to promoting certain symbols or suggestions over others. It was sent to 38 members of the Association who rated the section on ‘Individual symbols and diacritics’ 1–5 (on a scale of 17, with 1 being highest preference) in their reponses to the invitation to revise the International Phonetic Association's alphabet. Eighty members originally replied to the call for input to the Kiel meeting, so the 38 who placed this section high in their preferences are a good portion (47%) of members actively concerned with this Convention.

Ideally, we want to be able to state authoritatively which of the IPA's stipulations meet with acceptance, which are regarded as controversial, and which appear to have failed to make any impact at all. Account will have to be taken of the work not only of phoneticians, but also of colleagues in any discipline which uses phonetic terminology and notation.

Several systems have been developed to produce the complete inventory of IPA symbols in computer-coded form. Each has its own detail of coding, with a common core (albeit fairly small) of phonetically or graphemically logical key and ASCII assignments that can be identified across systems. Variation in the assignment of symbols to codes and keystroke locations is the result of different configurations of input device and of output device, and of differences in local convention and ease of character entry, of immediate needs in the transcription task, and of project objectives. The two major categories of coding objectives are: (a) for the purpose of identifying individual graphic IPA symbols by number, and (b) for the purpose of specifying the phonetic properties of the sound represented by each symbol or combination of symbols for the efficient encoding, recall, and manipulation of that information in a computerized data base.

The idea of preparing an updated or revised recording that illustrates the symbols or categories of the IPA was first proposed by Ladefoged and Roach (1986). These authors noted (ibid.: 28) that ‘Thanks to John Wells and Susan Ramsaran we already have a cassette recording illustrating the symbols in the current chart.’ Of the many phoneticians who responded to the announcement of the meeting in Kiel, about 25 expressed interest in planning recorded illustrations of the revised alphabet. Acting as coordinator for this activity, I sent out a tentative plan for the illustrations as a starting point for discussion.

A uniform dialect of Canadian English (CE) encompasses a wider territory than that of any other regional variety (Priestley (1951); Woods (1979); cf. Scargill and Warkentyne (1972) for suggested subdivisions; cf. also Bernard (1969) versus Horvath (1985) for the scope of Australian English, another widespread variety). This is a result of converging influences in Canada of varieties of British English and of Northern and Midland American (von Baeyer 1977; Woods 1979). The components of CE are a distinctive body of lexical items marked foremost by compounding, with many borrowings from French and the native Indian languages (Avis 1973; Harris 1975; Gregg 1979), certain minor syntactic features along with the stereotypical use of ‘eh’ (Avis 1978; Bailey 1982; Chambers 1986), and a ‘General’ Canadian accent, recognized as urban and educated, spreading westward from Ontario to the Pacific, and affecting even eastern Maritime speech (Gregg 1984a; Avis 1986; cf. Kinloch 1983). Within this broad framework (Avis 1973, 1986; Gregg 1984a), however, certain social and regional distinctions appear when phonological variability is considered within the Labovian model of sociological co-variation (e.g. Labov 1966, 1972; Trudgill 1974; Milroy 1987). A comparison of phonological items from two recent and concurrent sociodialectal surveys, one in eastern Canada for Ottawa (Woods 1979) and the other on the Pacific Coast for Vancouver (Gregg 1984b), reveals certain points of phonetic divergence socially and regionally, together with differential rates of sound change (de Wolf 1988).

The question of whether to analyse the intonation of a particular language in terms of tune or tone has been extensively discussed for English; recent accounts include Gibbon (1976: 101–92), Ladd (1980: 14–16), Cruttenden (1986: 55–8) and Couper-Kuhlen (1986: 67–72). It cannot, for all that, be said to be resolved. When it comes to French, however, the question has scarcely been aired at all, although Crompton (1980) does discuss the related question of ‘configurations’ versus levels versus tonetic stress marks (the latter surely an unlikely candidate for annotating the intonation of a language without lexical stress).

The widely different topics covered by the two contributions to this second Educational Phonetics section reflect well the intended scope of this section of the Journal. Brown's paper addresses an issue of recurring interest to teachers of English, namely the status of post-vocalic /r/ in different varieties of English and the acceptability, or otherwise, of intrusive or linking /r/. Duckworth and Ball look at the usefulness of the IPA in its present version for the representation of dysfluent speech, and suggest alternatives which the Association might wish to evaluate as part of its current revision of the symbols for transcription.

This article examines two related phenomena concerning the English phoneme /r/: linking/intrusive /r/ and rhotic /r/. The former is usually discussed in RP-oriented pronunciation drill books and phonetics textbooks. However, unless one adopts the narrow view that RP is the only feasible pronunciation model in a given situation, it is not legitimate to discuss linking/intrusive /r/ without mention of the second phenomenon – rhoticity. Indeed, as is shown below, these may be thought of not as two separate phenomena, but as two branches of the same phenomenon. Further, it is argued that linking/intrusive /r/ is not of great importance in English pronunciation teaching world-wide, and that the potential advantages of rhoticity are often underestimated.

Clinical phoneticians and speech pathologists often face difficulties in transcription of a different nature from those which the general phonetician encounters. A wide range of speech disorders present at the clinic (see Crystal 1980, 1981, 1984), and in many cases a detailed phonetic description of speech is an important part of the analysis and diagnosis of a person's problem (see Carney 1979, on the dangers of inadequate description).