American descriptivist morphology in the 1950s

element may account for other, quite separate phenomena. In the case at hand, Harris identifies this boundary element withone that would be posited in compound nouns, such as night-rate (whose pronunciation is quite different from that of nitrate); the allophones of the final sound of night in night-rate are quite different from the single phone possible in nitrate, and this difference can be described by positing a /-/ juncture in night-rate. Harris also argued that the /-/ juncture coincides with a position of possible pause. Harris also suggests (p. 82) that this juncture element can be used to replace the notion of syllable; instead of saying that a segment isthe first segment of a syllable, we can say that it is preceded by a /-/juncture. It is clear that Harris realized he was on to a new method, with this postulation of boundaries. He wrote, “by the setting up of the junctures, segments which had previously contrasted may now be associated together into one phoneme, since they are complementary in respect to the juncture.” (p. 86) Of course this flies in the face of phonemicist methodology; of course any contrast can now be accounted for without positing a new phonemeby positing a juncture that “triggers” a condition that the phoneme is realizedin a special way when in the context of this boundary. So what does Harris do? Of course he tells his reader that he is doing nothing new! Although the explicit use of junctures is relatively recent,the fundamental technique is involved in such traditional linguistic considerations as “word-final”, “syllabification’,’ and the use of space between written words. Maybe so; but many phonologists were unhappy about allowing phoneme realization rules to be sensitive to contexts like “word-final” for precisely this reason [quote from Hockett here]. Now Harris does something curious: he tells us what a linguist does: When a linguist sets up the phonemes of a language, he does not stop at the complementary elements of Chapter 7 [that is, traditional phonemic analysis, JG], but coalesces sets of these complementary elements by using considerations of juncture. In the case at hand, while we introduce /-/, Harris suggests we can get rid of two phonemes, /A/ and /E/, whereas American English of today may have only one sound, /A/, which can be gotten rid of here.