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99 NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS
(. ..)
The most frequent use of parentheses is to indicate something which is
optional. Thus kiwi(s) should be read as ‘kiwi or kiwis’ and judg(e)ment should
be read as ‘judgment or judgement’. The same meaning attaches to parentheses in
rule notation, so that (7) – which could be phrased more generally – applies
whether or not there is [l] before the [m], so that we get both [he˜m] and [he˜lm].
(7) e → e˜ / __ (l) m
In interpreting rules such as (7) you should always try the longest possible
expansion first (here the one which includes the [lm] cluster) before trying the
shorter one (here the one which has only [m] in the environment).
In sociolinguistics, parentheses are used to enclose the name of a variable, so
that ‘(ng)’ could refer to the variability between [ŋ] and [n] in words like
hunting, shooting fishing, etc.
�. ..�
Angle brackets are usually employed to enclose an orthographic representation,
so that we might want to say that ‘�ough� is pronounced [�f] in enough
but [əυ] in though.’
In phonological rule notation angle brackets used to be used to enclose parts
of the string which must either be all present or all absent for the rule to apply.
Sommerstein (1977: 140) gives the example of rule (8), which is to be read as
‘any vowel becomes short before two consonants, except that if the vowel is of
height 1, it requires that there either should be three consonants or that the two
consonant cluster should be word-final for this rule to apply’. (Vowels of height
1 are open vowels in Sommerstein’s notation.)
(8) V → [– long] / ___ CC < C >
#
In early variable rule notation, angle brackets are used to enclose a set of realisations
of some variable in a given context (see, e.g., Trudgill 1974: 156-9), or
to show variable constraints (see Mesthrie 1994: 4906).
In Optimality Theory, angle brackets are sometimes used to indicate extrametrical
constituents shown on tableaux.
[. ..]
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The most obvious use of square brackets is to enclose phonetic transcriptions.
The use of square brackets here contrasts with the use of slashes (see below)