ABSTRACT
In his complete revision of Daniel Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary (1977), Gimson did away with the hyphen symbol which Jones had considered 'necessary . . . [as] a means of showing "syllable separation" ... in all circumstances where the absence of suitable marking might lead to ambiguity in the interpretation of a phonetically transcribed word' (Jones 1963: xxvi). Thus in the twelfth edition, his last, Jones transcribed toe-strap as /ˈəu-stræp/ but toast-rack as /ˈtəust-ræk/. In Gimson's revision these words appear simply as /ˈtəʊstræp, ˈtaustraek/. While recognising that 'the situation of the syllable division (juncture) has implications for the duration and quality of the sounds involved', Gimson justifies his decision on the grounds that 'such divisions and their implications for pronunciation are generally evident from the orthography and from the meaningful segmentation (morpheme boundaries) of the word' (Jones 1977: xiv).
