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101 NOTATIONAL CONVENTIONS
use it according to the norms you have been taught. It is clear that any transcription
which details the minutiae of actual pronunciation cannot be enclosed
within slashes. The items enclosed between slashes always represent some
abstract analysis of the raw data.
|. . .|, ||. . .||
These notations are used synonymously to enclose morphophonemic transcriptions
where these are distinguished from phonemic transcriptions. Thus
the word right, phonemically /rait/, has been argued to be morphophonemically
|rixt|. The vertical line is also known as a pipe.
{. ..}
In rule notation, braces or curly brackets enclose options; that is, the rule will
work with any one of the things listed in braces. So in (8) we find C and # listed
as options, and that can be read as ‘followed by either C or #’. The vertical
layout of the options in (6) is usual, and is easy to read, but an alternative layout,
which would mean precisely the same thing, would be ‘{C, #}’. This has the
advantage of being space-saving, and the disadvantage of being harder to read.
The ease-of-reading advantage becomes clearer when there are several options
to be considered and not just two, or when one or more of the options is itself
complex.
Braces are also used to enclose morphemes where these are distinguished
from morphs. The morpheme is usually given in its default form, for example
‘{-able}’ for the morpheme that appears in both defendable and defensible.
However, when the morpheme represents some inflectional morphological
property, a description of the morpheme may be given instead, e.g. ‘{present
tense}’.
Since braces may be used to enclose morphemes, they are occasionally also
used to enclose morphophonemic transcriptions.
Single character notation
A number of alphanumeric characters have particular meaning in linguistic
notation, and some of the main ones are presented in table 16.1. Specific phonetic
symbols are not given here, and neither are initialisms and abbreviations
such as VOT (‘voice onset time’) or Infl (‘inflection’).