Checked/Unchecked Correlation in the English Vowels

Abstract

All English dialects show a series of oppositions of the type beet/bit, bet/bate, look/Luke, etc. Several have a complete correlation of this “checked/unchecked,” cutting through the entire vowel pattern. All interpretations of this opposition that play a rôle in current discussions treat the unchecked members of the correlation (e.g., beet, bate, Luke, etc.) as being formed by the addition of a specific mark to the corresponding checked member. For Smith and Trager (and Sweet before them), this mark was dipthongalization; for Jones, length; for Jakobson, Chomsky, and Halle, tenseness. These all assume some extra effort, some greater complexity, for the unchecked vowels as compared with the checked vowels. This assumption is contradicted, however, by the neutralization of this opposition in open syllables. That the archephoneme here is realized with a phonetic type resembling the unchecked term implies that either it is the checked term that is marked or that the English vowel system has a perverse economy in which a special articulatory effort is demanded precisely in contexts where this effort can have no linguistic relevance.