Re[4]: ka and k^a [was: [tied] *kW- "?"]

At 8:49:39 PM on Friday, September 23, 2005, Patrick Ryan
wrote:

> From: "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>

>> I rather suspect that there's little published research
>> simply because the question is fairly uninteresting: anyone
>> who's paid any attention at all is aware at least of the
>> pre-glottalized allophone, and probably of the [?] allophone
>> as well. It would be nice to have more data, but the
>> qualitative picture is pretty clear.

> "Paid attention" to what?

The speech of native speakers of English.

>>> What I get from this is a contradiction of the assertions
>>> made by Ladefoged who makes a following consonant
>>> necessary to fulfill the conditions for [t] into [?].
>>> Here, a pause is necessary.

>> No, it isn't. The information given here merely happens to
>> be restricted to that context. (What does seem from other
>> sources very likely to be true, however, is that the highest
>> incidence of [?] is indeed found in precisely that context.)

> "Obvious"?

To what are you responding here? I did not use the word in
that paragraph.

> Unnamed "sources". More empty generalizations.

Why should I bother to dig them out? Your mind's made up.
Besides, the parenthetical comment was to some degree
concessive: although your interpretation of the Huffman
article is wrong, and the phenomenon isn't limited to the
context used in the example, it is nevertheless probably
true that the specific context for which data were given is
the one in which the effect shows up most strongly. You
should have been happy to get even that much.

>>> And even then, in only _15%_ of the instances does [t]
>>> become [?] -

>> You mean that /t/ is realized as [?]; there was no [t] in
>> the first place in these utterances.

> Read it again. What does "final-/t/" mean? OOPS! How
> obvious! It does not mean /t/.

Why yes, it *does* mean /t/, when the choice is between that
and the [t] that you wrote; it just doesn't refer to all
instances of /t/.

>>> in the _Long Island_ area.

>> 15% is rather a lot when set against the claim that it
>> happens in no U.S. variety. And at least one of the
>> references that I cited a few hours ago adds some
>> independent data. The Dautricourt abstract notes that:

>> In a dataset consisting of over 400 tokens, comprising all
>> /t,d#y/ word pairs in hour-long interviews with 16
>> speakers, four variants predominated in the following
>> decreasing order of frequency: glottal stop, palatal
>> affricates, alveolar stops, and (alveolar stop) deletion.

> This does not bear on the question.

On the contrary, it is (in part) precisely to the point, as
it refers to a subset of the class of syllable-final /t/
(and /d/, which indeed is not directly to the point).

Brian