Words of certain semantic types which can be subsumed under the label ‘expressive’ (notably onomatopoeias, movement words, and words with pejorative, jocular, or intense connotations) have a tendency in a wide range of languages to be associated with peculiarities of phonological structure – these peculiarities include types of sounds, sound-sequences and syllable-structures which can be regarded as peripheral in the language concerned.

In an article in this Journal (Specification and English tenses) Crystal has pointed out the hitherto neglected role that adverbial determiners may play in giving unambiguous indication of time where the verbal tense-form itself is not specific enough: ‘It is [in such cases] not a question of tense-form alone giving the relevant distinguishing indication of time, as has been traditionally assumed, but of tense-form with or without adverbial specification which gives unambiguous indication’ (Crystal, 1966: 5). Adverbials may thus become ‘non-omissible determiners’ (a term borrowed by Crystal from Ivić, 1962).

Explanations answer or anticipate questions about why something happened or why something is as it is. Such questions are often difficult to answer, for they require us not only to think of an explanation, but to think of one that will satisfy the questioner. I shall not attempt here to evaluate the satisfactoriness of various types of explanation. Rewarding though such an investigation would undoubtedly be, its very initiation depends upon the prior resolution of a more mundane descriptive problem: which utterances should be classified as explanations—however unsatisfactory they may be—and which should be classified as something else? It is with this problem that I shall be concerned in this paper—with a search for formal properties that distinguish explanations from other kinds of utterance such as simple statements.

In recent literature on transformational grammar there has been a good deal of discussion of tag sentences (Klima, 1964; Katz and Postal, 1964; Bolinger, 1967; Arbini, 1969). The type of construction under consideration is exemplified in the following (incomplete) paradigm: (1) John has gone, hasn't he? (2) John hasn't gone, has he? (3) John has gone, has he (?) (4) John hasn't gone, hasn't he (?) (5) Come early, won't you (?) (6) Come early, will you (?)

It was attempted to analyse objectively the written style of different authors. Nineteen style variables were defined and the frequency of occurrence of these variables in samples of 1000 words each was counted. The Chi-square method was employed to evaluate the significance of differences found between authors and between samples of the same author. Results showed that all authors could be significantly differentiated from each other. There were much smaller and mainly insignificant differences between samples of the same author. Probable relationships between personality and style were discussed, and problems for future research were pointed out concerning linguistic and statistical aspects of the approach.

1. Dialectologists in England have concentrated on the speech of small and relatively isolated rural communities (see, for example, Orton and Dieth, 1962: Introduction, 14). Other linguists and phoneticians concerned with the English of England have almost without exception described Standard English and the form of pronunciation they call, using an established but less than happy term, ‘Received Pronunciation’ (Jones, 1967:xvii). Yet the English of most English (and English-speaking Welsh) people is neither RP Standard English nor a rural dialect. The vast mass of urban working-class and lower-middle-class speakers use a pronunciation nearer to RP, and lexical and grammatical forms much nearer to Standard English, than the archaic rural dialects recorded by the dialectologists. Yet their speech diverges in many ways from what is described as standard. The purpose of this article, which must be regarded as preliminary and tentative, is to sketch the principal phonetic variables among such local, mainly urban, forms of English.1 It is the task of anyone concerned with the description of these ‘accents’ of English to investigate whatever phonetic variables can be identified and to establish their correlation with the non-linguistic variables of age, social standing and education, and geographical provenance. (For discussion of some of the problems of urban dialectology, see particularly Wright, 1966.)