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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 98
marked with an asterisk to show that it is the one which stands out from the low
tones which are the default. In intonational uses of this notation, H* stands for
a high-tone pitch accent.
In Metrical Phonology, grids are often drawn with asterisks, though other
characters (e.g. x’s) are also used)
Notation involving font style
Small capitals
Small capitals are generally used to mark lexemes, using a notation introduced
by Matthews (1965) and Lyons (1968), although Lyons himself uses at least
three different notations in different works. Thus if we say that ‘be has the
forms am, is, are, was, were, be, being and been’, we can read this as ‘the lexeme
be . ..’.
Constraint names in Optimality Theory are also usually written in small capitals,
as illustrated in (6).
In interlinear glosses, grammatical categories are glossed in small capitals
(see section 30).
Wells’s lexical sets (introduced in Wells 1982) are also marked with small
capitals. For example, the fleece lexical set is the set of words which share the
same stressed vowel as the word fleece:words such as caesar, heap, keep, oestrus,
and so on. By generally accepted shorthand, that vowel is then referred to as
‘the fleece vowel’. Wells’s lexical sets are used as cue words for the introduction
of the transcription system used in this book on p. ix.
Italics
Italics (represented in manuscript by underlining) are used to show language
mention as opposed to language use (see section 31). Since what is mentioned
is usually a form, italics can be used to show word forms (as opposed to
lexemes) and morphs (as opposed to morphemes) where such distinctions are
being made or are relevant.
Brackets
Brackets are used in rule notation and also to isolate various theoretical structures.
Although it would in many ways be easier to consider the various types
of use independently, from the user’s point of view it is probably of more value
to know how the different kinds of brackets are used. This part is thus organised
in terms of the brackets involved, with the result that some themes (such
as rule notation) recur.