Flapping

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 04:17 PM 1/21/00 -0600, you wrote:
>"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.

We had a guest speaker recently, a phoneticist/phonetician from Ohio State,
who also said people "claim" you can't flap across word boundaries, after
which she smilingly said "I've got a lot of counter examples"--with flaps
in 'got a' and 'lot of'.  And I would flap in 'but her' as well as in 'butter'.
BTW Aaron, what do you mean by "mid-Atlantic" dialect:  trans-Atlantic?

>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 !!!