If semiotics is the general theory of communicative signs (Morris, 1938: 80), then phonetics constitutes part of that theory, in the sense that phonetics tries to model the means by which communication is achieved through the use of spoken signs. The technical vocabulary of phonetics is thus a sub-set of the meta-language of semiotics, and one might reasonably expect that other terms and concepts from semiotic theory, such as that of INDEXICAL and ICONIC signs (Feibleman, 1946: 91), might be illuminating when applied to the subject-matter of phonetics.

In this journal a number of suggestions have recently been made as to possible improvements to the Association's alphabet. Some of these proposals are relatively minor, involving only the addition of symbols or diacritics; the acceptance of these would have little or no effect on the basic character of the alphabet. But others, specifically those relating to the re-organization of the Cardinal Vowels and the consonant chart, are more thorough-going. Here, important principles are involved which would seem to demand more discussion. The following remarks are intended as a contribution to this discussion rather than as an evaluation of specific proposals.

1. In this article and the one to follow I shall be describing my approach to the problem of extracting a system of intonation from a corpus of unscripted colloquial Russian conversation, and discussing in detail the results obtained by this approach.

Contrastive phonology has been preoccupied with the phoneme concept and the isolated word. The Contrastive Structure Series demonstrates this quite clearly. In Moulton's contrastive comparison of English and German sounds (Moulton, 1962), to take a representative example of the series and of contrastive phonological studies in general, 107 pages out of 145 deal with the consonant and vowel phonemes in English and German words and with their contrastive analysis. Only 31 pages treat stress (largely word stress), intonation and the inevitable juncture, which is the epitome of word phonemics in that it looks at the incidence of boundary signals at word and morpheme boundaries, e.g. antrat and das Kitzeln with strongly aspirated stops as against Landrat and die Skizze with weakly aspirated or unaspirated stops indicating different divisions between word final and initial consonants (p. 142). I would like to mention in passing that this opposition is artificially constructed in word material by a linguist on the basis of the equally artificial codification in Siebs (de Boor et al., 1969), where again hardly any tribute is paid to segmental sentence phonology (Kohler, 1970).