Low Back /a/ to Low Central /a/

[Aaron E. Drews]

on 28/5/00 1:47 PM, Dennis R. Preston wrote:

> Herb's remark is right on. Here at MSU we have been looking at so-called
> "open-o" in lots of US dialects (which have the "cot-caught" distinction),
> and we find that absolutely none of them have a mid-back position. All of
> them are low-back. Kind of makes you wonder who Peterson and Barney
> recorded.
>

Could it be that Algeo or Peterson & Barney are using phonemic placeholders
rather than actual phonetic descriptions?  I've never consulted these, so I
may be out of line here.

Also, do American texts still consider "open-o" as the lax counterpart to
[o]?  Here, open-o is considered a tense vowel , so, even in phonemic terms,
it has to be low (or low mid according to the IPA, 1996).  Tent/carrot is
the lax counterpart of [o] and "cot" is the lax counterpart of "caught".
But if open-o is considered the lax counterpart of [o], which it was when I
started linguistics, then it would have to be mid, at least phonemically.

--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"
     --Death