Page 106 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes 7. Upton’s scheme
This hard-won uniformity was shaken, however, by Clive Upton’s appointment as pronunciation
consultant for Oxford’s native-speaker dictionaries. His scheme, adopted by the influential
Concise Oxford Dictionary (1995) remains quantitative-qualitative, but differs from the standard
scheme in the symbolization of five vowels (see box: the standard notation in green, Upton’s in
pink). In at least some of the cases one can see what motivated Upton to alter the standard
symbol: but in my view the supposed gains did not make up for the sacrifice of an agreed
standard.
e bet e
F bat a
f+ nurse c+
ec square e+
aw price w
Upton’s Reforms: for and against

• Bet: In some languages, notably French and German, one needs to distinguish two e-type vowels,
a closer one (IPA [e]) and an opener one (IPA [ ε ]). The English bet vowel lies between them, but
is more similar to [ ε ], which is why Upton prefers that symbol. However, from the point of
view of an EFL learner whose native language is, say, Japanese or Greek — languages that have
no such distinction — it is quite unnecessary to distinguish the “[e]” at the starting point of the
face diphthong from the “[ ε ]” of bet. And following IPA principles, if we are to choose just one
of the two symbols we should prefer the simpler one.
• Bat: It is well known that the quality of the RP bat vowel has changed since the 1930’s. It is now
more similar to “cardinal [a]” than it used to be. Hence Upton’s choice of the [a] symbol. A
more conservative line is to stick with the familiar symbol [ F ], but to redefine it as appropriate.
That, after all, is what we have all done with the [  ] symbol for the vowel of cut, blood, which
used to be a back vowel but now has a central/front quality for which the most specific IPA
symbol would probably be [ X ] (turned a). A further argument in favour of retaining the symbol
[ F ] is that it preserves the parallelism with American and Australian English, in which the
movement towards an opener quality has not taken place.
• Nurse: For many speakers there is no appreciable difference in quality between the short [ c ] in
ago and the long vowel of nurse. Hence Upton writes them with the same symbol, with and
without length marks. The arguments against this are that (i) all other long-short pairs use
distinct letter shapes alongside presence/absence of length marks; (ii) schwa is a weak vowel,
restricted to unstressed syllables, and subject to very considerable variability depending on its
position. This is not true of the nurse vowel. (I concede that the logic of this argument would
lead also to the avoidance of the schwa symbol in the goat diphthong [ c ]. It might well have
been better if Gimson had chosen to write it [ f ]. I was tempted to innovate in LPD by using
that symbol. But I decided, rightly I believe, that it was not worth upsetting an agreed standard
for.)
• Square: People do increasingly use a long monophthong for this vowel, rather than the schwa-
tending diphthong implied by the standard symbol. What used to be a local-accent feature has
become part of the mainstream. There are millions of English people, however, who still use a
diphthong. To produce the distinction in pairs such as shed — shared EFL learners generally
find it easier to make the square vowel diphthongal ([ ec ]) rather than to rely on length alone.
• Price: The standard notation might seem to imply that the starting point of the price diphthong
is the same as that of the mouth diphthong. In practice, speakers vary widely in how the two
qualities compare. In mouth people in the southeast of England typically have a rather bat-like

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