"Monday"

Paul Johnston paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU
Mon Jul 30 16:51:46 UTC 2012


I seem to have the same rule that you do, with raising before alveolars.  I tried distinguishing "Rosa's", "Rose's" and "roses".  For me, "Rosa" when alone ends in schwa, but the others have a lax barred-i-to-backwards-e.  But I'm sure there's all kinds of variation in unstressed vowels and ongoing changes--my MI students actually have some unstressed [E]'s where I would have barred-i and older MI speakers would too.  (It seems to be associated with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift--students with high frequencies of shifted forms are the ones with the [E]'s).  Spelling pronunciations exist too, I'm sure.

Back in the day, my phonetics teacher's assistant used to drive us nuts because he couldn't make a distinction between caret, schwa and upside-down-and-backwards-a when giving transcription exercises, whether these vowels were stressed or unstressed.  He was from Worcester, MA.  But I imagine this is true for a lot of people.  In the dictionaries, words ending in -a, like Rosa or China are supposed to be low.  They rarely are for me or my students.  I have plain ( backed ) schwa, which is also my vowel in cup and my V1 in the diphthong in road.  My students' vowel in cup matches their unstressed schwa, though realizations vary from about where mine is to true carets and even slightly rounded forms, like Labov got from Chicago speakers. ("Buses" sounds like "bosses").  But the -es ending is mostly barred-i or [E], never schwa.


Paul Johnston
On Jul 30, 2012, at 12:19 PM, W Brewer wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Monday"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> LH: <<< WB characterized the raising of [@] to barred-i in "Leominster" as
> allophonic>>>.
>
> WB: No he di'int. WB don't even know what Leominster is. It was Joel the
> Pretentious who said something about Herman Munster, or something. WB
> speaks only for his own personal idiolect, which is his and belongs to him,
> and is not incorrect because prescriptivism is a sin. For WB, unstressed
> /schwa/ in normal, unreflective speech tends to be raised to [barred-eye]
> before alveolars at the ends of words at least. This is a natural
> assimilatory process. Exceptions seem to be when a contrast is called for,
> as in Rose's vs. (emphatically schwa'ed) Rosa's. Maybe I would say
> _Cuba's_Castro_ with the <a> kept lower than barred-eye, but not really
> schwa. I think LH said something about spelling pronunciation as an
> influence. I would say, in old fashioned Latinate terminology, that the
> possessive ending is being influenced by the casus rectus, which is
> analogical leveling of the schwa.**
>
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