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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 100
in ways which may not be obvious. The default notation is to use square brackets;
the use of slashes makes particular claims about the transcription being
used.
The term ‘phonetic transcription’ is unfortunately ambiguous. It may mean
no more than a transcription using phonetic symbols. It may also be used to
contrast with a ‘phonemic transcription’, in which case ‘phonetic transcription’
may be more or less synonymous with ‘narrow transcription’.
Narrowness, of course, is a matter of degree: one transcription may be narrower
than another. When ‘phonetic’ is used in this sense, it covers all degrees
of narrowness.
Note that in rule notation (and, increasingly, elsewhere) phonetic transcriptions
(of whichever kind) are not enclosed in brackets at all. See (7) for
an example. This is partly for clarity, and partly because the status of an
element in a rule may be unclear, or variable from one application to the
next.
Square brackets are also used to enclose distinctive features (like the [– long]
in (8)) or arrays of distinctive features defining a single unit: in phonology, that
unit is generally the segment, in syntax and semantics it may be the word. Thus
we find examples like those in (9).
(9) �verb
�vocalic �3rd person �bovine
a. C �long # b. �plural c. �female
�back �past �adult
More generally, square brackets are used to mark parenthetical material
inside a parenthesis. This includes uses such as the notation ‘Smith (1999
[1905])’, meaning that the reference is to a 1999 edition of a work first published
in 1905. Square brackets are also used for interpolations and corrections
within quotations, including such annotations as sic.
/. ../
� � � � � �
The technical printers’ name for the characters involved here is virgules, but
the notation is also referred to as obliques, slash-brackets or just slashes.
Slashes enclose a phonetic transcription which meets certain criteria. Where a
single segment appears between slashes, it must refer to the phoneme, so that
‘/p/’ can be read as ‘the phoneme /p/’. Where a longer stretch of speech is
transcribed between slashes, the claim is that each of the elements in the transcription
represents a phoneme and no extra information is provided. The
reason that this is not necessarily clear is that the term ‘phoneme’ tends to be
used differently within different schools of phonology. You therefore have to