Flapping

[Mike Salovesh]

"Aaron E. Drews" wrote:
>
> In going through my data, I have found something strange happening across
> the word boundary in "but hoped"  (The read sentence is "John had read the
> book, but hoped the movie version would be better").
>
> Can the /t/ in <but> be flapped before <hoped> for any of you?  To me, it
> sounds natural flapped, but I could just be staring at my data for too
> long (not unusual).  If it can't be flapped, how would _you_ realise it.
>
> All of the literature has flapping before vowels, but /h/ is special;
> my pronouncing dictionary only has words in isolation; my native
> intuitions are a bit off since I speak mid-Atlantic.

Flapping before vowels sounds natural to me inside a word, but not
across words in a phrase or sentence.

I don't flap there.  In my speech, the word juncture is marked by a
shift to  what I would say if pronouncing a word such as "tope": stop
plus unvoiced vocoid of the same shape as the following voiced vowel.
That is, an aspirated /t/ plus vowel, as in word initial /t/ before
vowel.

A possible parallel appears in the sentence "She serves good cream, but
her butter is horrible."  I use aspirated /t/ in "but her", and a flap
in "butter".

Don't let my speech skew your dialect map, however. Like your version of
mid-Atlantic, my idiolect is some kind of blend.  In my case, that was
deliberate but the choice was not mine.  Intensive "voice", "elocution",
and singing coaching between the ages of eight and fifteen permanently
warped my pronunciations toward Midwest U.S. broadcast standard. That
carried me from boy soprano soloist in choirs to the start of a 3-B
(Baritone Barroom Bawler, subspecies folksinger) career.

-- mike salovesh                    <salovesh at niu.edu>
PEACE !!!