The history of the classical vowel articulation model: a reply to Catford and Fischer-Jørgensen

This paper is devoted to a discussion of Catford's and Fischer-Jørgensen's defence of the classical vowel articulation model (1, 2, 3). Objections to the model are not directed at Bell's personality, but at the theoretical structure of his model: critical functions of the model are contradicted by empirical data and by acoustical theory. Nor are the ojections only relevant for amendments introduced by Jones. That argument is contradicted by the chronology of the debate.

# J. C. Catford, 1981, "Observations on the recent history of vowel classification", in R. E. Asher and J. A. Henderson eds., Towards a History of Phonetics, 19-32, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
# E. Fischer-Jørgensen, 1983, "Vowel features and their explanatory power in phonology", in Abstracts of the 10th Int. Congress of Phonetic Sciences, 259-265, Foris Publications, Dordrecht.
# E. Fischer-Jørgensen, 1985, "Some basic vowel features, their articulatory correlates, and their explanatory power in phonology", in V. Fromkin ed., Phonetic Linguistics, 79-99, Academic Press, Orlando).