Will that be pop, soda or a soft drink?

[Laurence Horn]

Problems with transcription, perhaps, but...

At 7:53 AM -0800 3/15/03, vida morkunas wrote:
>Will that be pop, soda or a soft drink?
>
>http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030315/FCLANG/
>
>What you say is what you are, reports STEPHEN COLE. If you want 'icing,' not
>'frosting,' on your cake, you're definitely Canadian
>
>By STEPHEN COLE
>  UPDATED AT 10:53 AM EST  Saturday, Mar. 15, 2003
>...
>"I'm a dual citizen and chameleon," he says. "I fit in linguistically
>wherever I go."
>
>Which means, in Canada, he looks for a "shed'yool" to determine the
>"pro-gres" of trains to the city, where he might have pasta (short a) at a
>restaurant. In the States, however, he'd be saying "skej-oo-al," "praw-gres"
>and "past-ah."

...I have no idea what to make of this.  Past-ah?  Is the claim that
in Canada "pasta" is pronounced basically as in Italian while in the
States the first syllable is essentially "pass" or as in "(I'm) past
i(t)", with an /ae/?  What part of the States would that be?    I
also wondered about the "praw-gres", which doesn't seem like
something I've heard--I'm more familiar with an [a] vowel here,
different indeed from the Canadian and British /o/, but not in the
way indicated, but I would expect that to differ as the open-o vs.
/a/ distinction typically does.

>
>Mr. Boberg's recent "lexical" survey,

funny scare quotes, suggesting that there's another, REAL kind of
lexical survey.  Or that this is a slang use of "lexical".
>

larry