End Of Phrase Research Articles

Notes on the Pronunciation of 'On'

AS IS generally known, the unrounding of 'short o,' which began in seventeenth-century England, has produced a considerable range of variation in present-day speech. In southern England the rounded [D] though usually considered standard,1 is often replaced by [a]. In America, the range extends from [a] through [a] and [n] to [v], with additional diphthongal variants in the South. In some categories of the 'short-o' words, the range is minimal: hot, stop, and lockJ except for minor local preferences for [a] or [D], are overwhelmingly pronounced with [a]. On the other hand, words like log, gong, honk, torest>2 and warrant show the full range of variation, some of them with distinct regional patterns. The word on differs from other 'short-o? words in two respects: it has a very frequent unstressed form, generally pronounced somewhat like [an]; its stronger forms show regional variations which do not correspond very closely with those of other 'short-o' words. In order to get at the regional variations I have tested the word chiefly at the ends of such phrases as '... turned the radio on' and '.... time to be getting on,' where at least a moderate degree of stress is normal. I have classiEed the [a] and [a] variations as unrounded; [n] and [v], as rounded, though [D] may often, and [v] occasionally, be produced withoult noticeable liprounding. The [a] variation occurs most frequently in the Ontario watershed in New York, occasionally in the Great Lakes area further west, and spottily as far away from the Lakes as Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Of the rounded varieties, [n] is more frequent in New England; [o], in the South. In the following data, [a] and [a] are recorded as U for unrounded; [D] and [v], as R for rounded: Maine: U 13 instances, R 9 instances, U 59%; New Hampshire: U 19, R 3, U 86%; Vermont: U 99, R 5, U 95%; Massachusetts: U 116, R 3y, U 76%; Rhode Island: 21 instances, all U; Connecticut: U 79, R 1, U 98%; New York: U 1766, R 14, U 99%; northern3 New Jersey: U 320, R 31, U 91%o; southern New Jersey: U 26, R 52, R 67%; northern

The Position of "Deferred" Nouns and Adjectives in Epic and Dramatic Verse

-Our appreciation of classical verse is seriously affected by the difficulty of estimating certain factors in ancient verse that are alien to most modern poetry. The editor of Horace's Odes notes the artistic interlocking of words; the student of Propertius discovers a high degree of conscious art in the rhymed endings of words at the ends of metrical phrases; the student of epic observes the emphasis produced by position at the beginning of the hexameter, or the artificial bracketing of a verse by words at the beginning and end which are in sound or sense, or both, closely related. Such observations are often quite true from a descriptive standpoint; but after these features have been described there remains a more difficult problem: Just what degree of conscious art is represented by such features of ancient verse? To what extent are they due to conditions of verse composition beyond the poet's control? To what extent do they reveal a happy compromise between mechanical necessity and the artist's natural desire to enforce the thought and embellish the form ? The final appreciation of the poet's art must carry us beyond mere description, which is seldom altogether free from the influence of the critic's sympathy with modern poetry, and lead us to an understanding of the peculiar problems of the ancient poet, of the necessary adjustment of conflicting factors, many of which are foreign to modern verse. A feature of epic verse that has escaped general recognition but has been incidentally noted by one or two special students of Homer and Vergil is the somewhat monotonous regularity with which words and phrases that escape into the second verse of a sequence of two verses stand at the beginning of the second verse rather than elsewhere. Such words are closely connected in thought with the first verse and might reasonably be expected to stand somewhere near the beginning rather than the end of the second verse in response to the natural requirements of collocation. But there is a stereotyped