Palin's speech

[Wilson Gray]

A couple of trivial, FWIW comments on the LgLog piece.

Abstracting away from the fact that "gonna" can represent a broad
range of phonetic reflexes, not necessarily only one, back in the day,
ca.1972-73, Haj Ross pointed out the creeping replacement of "gonna"
[gOn@] by "gunna" [g^n@] in informal white speech in a lecture at
M.I.T. It seems to me that this shift is continuing

When I lived in California, ca.1957-72, "g-drop" was so common in
non-informal - but not necessarily in fully-formal - speech, as when
presenting papers at conferences like those of the California
Linguistic Association (still in existence?) among white college
students from UCLA to UC Davis that it began to seem like a trait of
California sE a-borning to me. Under those same circumstances, I
personally always felt that [-N] was called for. I.e., I found it
annoying, as though all the effort that I had put into constructing a
second phonology had gone for naught. If I'd known that *they* were
going to be using [-n], *I* could have continued to use it!

But that's me, as is said in the 'hood.

-Wilson

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 4:21 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Palin's speech
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> on Language Log:
>
>   AZ, 9/26/08: What Palin's gonna do:
>  http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=640
>
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