Can a have an A, men?

[Jocelyn Limpert]

Yes, I meant "before" -- my fingers having a life of their own, it would
appear, and my brain not stopping to proof before sending! Thanks for the
further explanation.

On 2/5/09, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Can a have an A, men?
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Feb 5, 2009, at 8:26 AM, Jocelyn Limpert wrote:
>
> > ... once I was aware of the
> > use of "a" and "an" by our president, I listened very carefully. And
> > in
> > virtually all instances, he used the "a" for "an" only after a pause.
>
> only *after* a pause?  did you mean *before*?
>
> pauses come at planning points in production -- that is, right before
> the choice is made.  so pauses are especially common following
> articles, conjunctions, and the like.
>
> a further complication: listening for pauses can be a tricky
> business.  people who study pausing and related phenomena don't rely
> on their ears, but look at traces (like spectrograms) that can be
> measured.
>
> in the case at hand, if a speaker has word-final schwa (in "a")
> followed by a word-initial vowel, a glottal stop will intervene, and
> that glottal stop might well be interpreted by hearers as a brief pause.
>
> so there's a lot further to find out.
>
> arnold
>
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