"Connecticut accent" in the Times

[Alice Faber]

Laurence Horn said:
>At 2:10 PM -0400 9/9/04, Alice Faber wrote:
>>Arnold M. Zwicky said:
>>>On Sep 9, 2004, at 8:58 AM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>>>
>>>>   Sorry, forgot to post this article from the Sunday Times regional
>>>>   Connecticut section...
>>>>   A lot of
>>>>   this is pretty silly or sloppy, but the glottal stop (in e.g. "New
>>>>   Britain") is certainly a real feature...
>>>
>>>whoa!  most americans have a glottal stop as their allophone of /t/ in
>>>"Britain" (and "button" and "satin" and generally after an accented
>>>vowel before syllabic n).  now, "cattle" and "bottle" are another
>>>matter entirely...
>>
>>Nonetheless, this [nu bri?n] *is* a salient local shibboleth.
>>Everybody focuses on the glottal stop when they mock the dialect.
>>However, I suspect that what's really different is the following
>>vocoid. For most of us, it's a syllabic [n]. But in New Britain,
>>there's an actual vowel somewhere between schwa and barred-i.
>>--
>I think Alice is right on this, but I've always assumed the consonant
>was different too--could it be that there's also some alveolar
>closure for most of us, but only a glottal closure for the locals?  I
>guess I should recuse myself, as I'm getting very confused here.

That's certainly plausible. I have some data (which I should get off
my duff and write up) showing that so-called glottal replacement in
other contexts preserves the alveolar closure. That is, in tokens
where (a) any competent transcriber would transcribe [?] (and not
[?t] or the like) and (b) there is no trace of any kind of formant
transitions into an alveolar, there is nonetheless articulatory
evidence of an alveolar closure that is hard to distinguish from the
alveolar closure in tokens where [?t] is preserved and that have
appropriate transitions.
--
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Alice Faber                                             faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203) 865-8963