/or/ distinctions: TOUR

[Aaron E. Drews]

on 14/4/00 4:38 PM, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

> One more query along this line: in my pronunciation, TOUR usually has the
> vowel of BOOT

This brings up another question I have.  Is it actually pronounced with the
BOOT vowel, or more the BOOK vowel?  Kenyon suggests that tense vowels
followed by (tautosyllabic) r become lax.  This makes sense historically,
and I can hear it in my own speech, but does it really happen (perhaps on a
"low level", since we tend to transcribe the tense vowels+r without
hesitation.)

on 18/4/00 3:07 AM, Arnold Zwicky wrote:

> even
> linguists are inclined to "phonemic hearing" in such circumstances.)


Cheers,
Aaron

________________________________________________________________________
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"
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