schwa-raising and related

[Roger Lass]

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This discussion is wandering off into some rather interesting byways. I'd
like to make some observations and raise a few questions.

1. Why does a token have to 'belong' to some specific phoneme at all? Are
phoneme inventories necessarily exhaustive? Couldn't it be the case that in
noisy or obscure environments you can get values that hover between what
might in other environments be norms for other phonemes, and that are simply
not assignable? It could be a kind of structuralist error to assume that
every utterance token belongs exhaustively to some determinate class.
Perhaps, since hearers are looking for meaning, a lot of detail is simply
allowed to be fudged, as long as context gives enough clues for
interpretation? There are alternative models of phonological structure (like
the one in Bybee 2001) that don't in fact have fully determinate
inventories. Perhaps worth thinking about.

2. On 'falcon'. I wonder what the background of the speaker who started all
this was, and how much of the word was actually listened to as carefully as
the unstressed vowel. What follows is impressionistic, but perhaps no less
relevant for that. I was brought up in New York and am married to a speaker
whose dialect is a kind of 'mixed' E Pennsylvania and New York. But I have
lived in 'British' environments for the past 30 years, 11 years in Edinburgh
and 20 in Cape Town. In other words, my primary exposure to other speakers
of English over this time has been to dialects other than my own, and I have
been teaching in these environments.

One thing I've observed over the past few years is that I have two quite
distinct versions of /ae/; a lower one, which is native, and a higher one,
which is distinctly not, but more like an RP /ae/ than a New York one. The
higher version is not 'native', but adopted. I also have, like any New
Yorker, and here I have not changed, a dark /l/ in all positions pretty
much, though the coarticulation varies with the surrounding vowels. Looking
at my own pronunciations of 'falcon', I find that if I use the higher /ae/,
the following /l/ is palato-velarised ('barred-i' vocalic quality), and the
unstressed final vowel is distinctly [I]-like. If I use the slightly lower
native /ae/, which may be a bit retracted as well, the /l/ is uvularised,
and the unstressed vowel is [@] quality.

I don't know to what extent there's a literature in English on the effect of
preceding vowels on /l/-quality, but my system appears to be rather
sensitive to even rather small distinctions, rather more like Finnish than
the usual descriptions of English. If I go totally 'Brit' and have my
'bought' vowel (approximately IPA 'backward c') in the first syllable of
'falcon', the /l/ is pharyngealised, and the unstressed final vowel rather a
centralised [^]. So it looks as if at least words containing /l/ may be
'harmonic' to a certain extent. It would be nice to know what kind of /ae/
the speaker who started this all had, and how complex the substrate of his
speech was.