A language […] may have special features of stress, tone, drawl, etc., stretching over phrases, sentences, etc. All these features are phonemic if they are necessary to a bi-unique correlation between our description and the spoken utterance. All of them are non-successive in the sense that segmental phonemes are successive, since they do not occur between one such phoneme and the next, but are simultaneous with some phonemes (usually a vowel), or with a syllable. However, whereas in the first case the non-successive feature is localized on a particular phoneme, in other cases it is localized over whole successions of phonemes, i.e. over longer intervals. Trager’s system is of interest to the treatement of all non-successive phonemes, but applies specifically to the first case.
- Harris (1942b), a pag.242