Re: resyllabification

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 10/26/03 8:07:29 PM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes:


> two-word expressions are sometimes resyllabified as single words,
> especially by people who have reason to say them a lot.  for many
> people, "last night" (with the pronunciation "las' night"), "this
> morning", and "this evening" are usually pronounced with the final s of
> the first syllable moved to begin the (accented) second syllable.  and
> some people do this with their own names; Bob Edwards, host of NPR's
> Morning Edition, regularly does this  to the final b of "Bob", and i
> just heard Sandip Roy do it to the final p of "Sandip" (in both cases,
> again moving a consonant into the syllable with primary accent).
> 
> last week, i heard (from another room) the tv repeat what i at first
> took to be "Mister Crivver", but then when i got closer it was more
> like "Misty Crivver".  then i *saw* the commercial, an ad for the movie
> "Mystic River".  presumably the guy doing the voice-over had said the
> name so many times that he was treating it like a single word, so the k
> moved into the third syllable (once again the syllable with primary
> accent).
> 
> undoubtedly there are more examples to be found.
> 
> arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)
> 
Some quick thoughts:
I wonder what happens to the potential aspiration of the /p/ in a 
resyllabified "Sandrip Roy". With a word boundary between the /p/ and the /r/, I believe 
there is normally little if any aspiration of the /p/. But with the word 
boundary before the /p/, I'd tend to aspirate the /p/ quite strongly. Compare 
"night rate" with "Nye Trait"--for me, the /t/ in "night rate" often gets reduced 
to a glottal stop (therefore without any aspiration). Of course, in these 
examples the stress is on the initial syllable, not the second one, but even so, I 
think I would in general have a lot of trouble EVER resyllabifying words that 
end in vowel + /t/, I think--the aspiration of the /t/ after the word boundary 
would make the resyllabified word sound too different. Could e.g. "rabbit 
rot" become "rabbi trot"?

I think the same holds for "Mystic River "--> "Misty Criver" -- was the guy 
really resyllabifying it, or were you just missing some cues? Wouldn't there be 
aspiration on the /k/ if it were truly syllable-initial?