System Status of Obscured Vowels in English

In the introduction to their recent book on eastern American dialects, Kurath and McDavid have a short section headed ‘Vowels in Unstressed and Weakly Stressed Syllables’. The first sentence is: ‘All dialects of American English have a free vowel /ə/ that occurs only in unstressed syllables.‘ The question here is whether or not it is proper or advantageous or both to include in a phonemic inventory of English such a vowel or possibly more than one. The alternative to something like /ə/ restricted to occurrence in unaccented syllables is of course identification of every vowel appearing in an unaccented syllable with one or another of the vowels appearing in accented syllables

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