ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses mainly on the phonetics of the SVLR, which forces us to concentrate on Scottish Standard English, since there are no relevant instrumental studies on Scots, so far as we are aware. It introduces the dialectal background confronting all phonetic SVLR studies. It discusses Aitkens original presentation of the rule. It also discusses the results of three instrumental studies into the SVLR system of Scottish Standard English (SSE) and gives the author's own synthesis of their findings. It highlights some important social differences between Edinburgh and Glasgow which the author thinks lead to linguistic differences in MC varieties of SSE. It focuses on the patterns of phonetic vowel duration, making use of the data at our disposal, which have been collected in large part from middle-class speakers of Scottish English.
