Phonemes of New York Dialect

[David L. White]

----- Original Message -----
From: Leo A. Connolly <connolly at memphis.edu>
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2001 8:41 PM

> Sombody wrote:

>>> An example that I am very familiar with concerns the tensing and raising of
>>> [ae] (that is "ash") in the New York City area.  ...

> David White replied:

>> Perhaps I am missing something here (other than the opportunity for more
>> dutiful slogging), but it seems to me that the facts may be acounted for if
>> we posit 1) that tensing/raising always occurs before two moraic consonants
>> (as in "can't, presumably even under high stress), and 2) that otherwise
>> tensing/raising occurs before one moraic consonant (save voiceless plosives)
>> in words of middling stress ("can", unlike "can't", always has either high
>> or low stress, or so it seems to me).  (The second phenomenon might happen
>> because words of high stress tend to have a sort of circumflex tone, which
>> in its end part, the part that is relevant when we are dealing with
>> following consonants, is similar to un-stress.  Thus high and low stress
>> might pattern together, against middling stress.)  Under this scenario,
>> agentive "adder" would have to be syllabified as /aed.R/ (or whatever /R/ is
>> in this dialect), as opposed to /ae.dR/.  This is a bit odd, but I do not
>> see any way around it, if a remotely unified account is to be attempted.
>> The question is whether such a syllabification is permitted.

> This solution seems wrong, since with the sole exception of non-standard
> _yeah_, raised and tensed [E:] and normal [ae] both occur only in closed
> syllables.  Neither do I see what morae have to do with it.

        Since every word that ends with a consonant ends with a moraic
consonants, bringing moras in permits a unified account.

> Stress?  Maybe, since it is contrastive stressing of the normally unstressed
> modal that underlies such forms as _if I [kaen]_ ('am able') beside _if I
> [kE:n] (put up tomatoes).  A neat minimal pair, that,. since the stresses on
> the two forms are equal.

        If the two "can"s contrast under high stress, then they are indeed a
minimal pair.  I do not know how any other interpretation could be taken.
But I also do not know if they do.  Beyond all this, there is the question
of how the contrast ever arose (what was going on the pre-phonemic phase),
and here I think moras are unavoidable.

Dr. David L. White