- Archibald A. Hill, Introduction to Linguistic Structures: From Sound to Sentence it English, 496 pp., New York, 1958.
- I am using the terms ‘expansive’ and ‘reductive’ for the two kinds of procedure—in preference to the distinction between ‘working up’ and ‘working down’ through ‘the hierarchy’. The latter terminology would suggest that the opposed procedures share one and the same notion of linguistic hierarchy—which, as we shall see, is patently false. The so-called hierarchy of language is not just ‘given’. It is the product of linguistic analysis; and each of the two procedures produces another. Either may be said to ‘work up’ to its top-level. The decisive question is what to take for the ground-level of the hierarchy—sentences or sounds.
- I once distinguished, in the same sense, between ‘analytic’ description and ‘synthetic’ (On Defining Linguistic Units, Transactions of the Philological Society, 1954); but this use of two rather overburdened terms does not seem to have found much favor.
- If treatment of prosodic features continues to be the least satisfactory part of phonological analysis, the reason seems to lie in what Professor J. R. Firth has described as “the misapplication of the principles of vowel and consonant analysis to the prosodies” (cf. “Sounds and Prosodies” in Papers in Linguistics, 1934–1951, pp. 121–138). It is significant that the most helpful contributions in this field have come from scholars who would not comply with the schedule of a combinatorial analysis.
- Choose new content alerts to be informed about new research of interest to you
- Easy remote access to your institution's subscriptions on any device, from any location
- Save your searches and schedule alerts to send you new results
- Export your search results into a .csv file to support your research