Low Back /a/ to Low Central /a/

[Dennis R. Preston]

Aaron,

P&B are using acoustic data, but, of course, they group their data on the
basis of traditional phonemic word-classes.

dInIs



>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


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736