Re: the null phoneme

15-08-03 12:33, Jean-Paul G. POTET wrote:

> No doubt emphasis plays its part, but, to me, English has the initial
> glottal stop whenever there is no liaison.
> The liaison rule operates for utterances like <an ear>, constituted of a
> single iambic foot : [°@ "nI@], but it does not in the case of <one ear>,
> <two ears>,
> In utterances like <one ear>, <two ears>, that are constituted of two
> trochaic feet each, isn't the glottal stop compulsory : ["°wAn '°?I@],
> ["°thu '°?I@z]?

I don't think so, but then I was explicitly instructed by my RP
pronunciation teachers to avoid the glottal stop in such cases. Let's
hear the opinion of our native English-speakers (the avoidance of [?]
may well be a dialectal phenomenon). I insert in when speaking Polish,
but because of my training I say <two ears> without a glottal stop. I am
aware of a momentary diminution of energy between the vowels, but it's
probably Ladefoged & Maddieson's "creaky voiced glottal approximant",
for which they use the symbol [*].

Piotr