/or/ distinctions and more

[Dennis R. Preston]

Aaron,

Yes, my morning-mourning are also distinct but left in the younger
generation before thier cot-caught collapse. The collapse is in the cot
direction. They appear to still have the caught vowel in the historically
high-likelihood environments, however (voiced velars [frog] fricartives
[cough], etc...) so the merger is complex. Is it a phonemic merger with
allophones or a "loss" of some members of one phoneme class to another,
leaving some "unpredictables, hence "phonemes," behind.

Messy eh?

dInIs

PS: Sorry for the formality. Ah gits to talkin' variationist phonology and
fergits who Ah am.

>on 7/4/00 9:00 PM, dInIs wrote:
>
>> Aaron,
>>
>> I (and my generation of South Midland speakers) have it (b. 1940);
>
>I gather (trying to remember Labov's map correctly) that you also
>distinguish cot~caught?
>
>> younger
>> speakers do not. Haven't studied the transition.
>
>How's the caught~cot thing with the younger speakers?  I'm finding that
>syllable-rhyme /r/ does funny things with the phonology, and I think the
>caught~cot merger is a part of it in a tangential way (mourning~morning
>merges first, then caught~cot).
>
>Thanks, again,
>Aaron
>
>
>>
>> Dennis
>  ^^^^^^
>Is this you getting formal? :-)
>
>
>
>________________________________________________________________________
>Aaron E. Drews                               The University of Edinburgh
>http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron      Departments of English Language and
>aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk                    Theoretical & Applied Linguistics
>
> "MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF"
>  --Death


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736