Implosives in English

[Herb Stahlke]

Alice,

Frank Trechsel mentioned to me that he had done some work with you at UT-Austin, so I thought I'd write to you about something I'm working on now.  The project is an attempt to bring together a lot of what is known about English obstruents and make a little more sense of it.  The fortis/lenis contrast, the same thing as Jakobson, Fant and Halle's tense/lax, is at the heart of it, which is no surprise to any English phonologist or phonetician.

Specifically, I'm looking now at implosive stops found in Lower Great Plains dialects, from central Texas up to Nebraska and as far east as Arkansas and Missouri.  It may extend beyond that, but those are the boundaries I've defined based on speakers of checked with.  In this region, especially working-class speakers use implosives instead of lenis stops initially in stressed syllables.  I haven't heard any cases of /bl, br, dr, gl, gr/ with implosives, just the stop as a simple onset.  Are you aware of this pronunciation, its distribution, and any constraints on it?  Has it been reported in the literature?  I haven't found anything written on it.

Thanks,

Herb Stahlke
Ball State University