ABSTRACT
The vowels of English (standard British and American dialects) fall into two sets: those that are short and lax, and those that are long and tense. Chomsky and Halle (1968; henceforth SPE) propose that English vowels are underlyingly either tense or lax; length is a derived phenomenon. The revision of this work by Halle and Mohanan (1985) replaces the tense/lax distinction with one between long and short vowels, respectively, with quality derived. In both treatments the two categories of vowels are represented in the same way for American and British dialects, since both treatments synchronically recapitulate the Great Vowel Shift, which historically pre-dated the settlement of America by speakers of English. This paper argues that standard British and American dialects have in fact diverged with respect to this major division in the English vowel system; specifically, while British English retains an underlying long/short distinction, American English has innovated a tense/lax system. The major evidence presented for this synchronic difference is the treatment of modern loans into the two dialects.
