"Connecticut accent" in the Times

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 9, 2004, at 2:10 PM, Robert Wachal wrote:

> I believe that most of us have a glottally released /t/ rather than a
> glottal stop in the cases cited below.

i most emphatically do not have a glottally released /t/ in "Britain",
"button", etc.  but it only now (after decades) occurs to me that some
people might actually have a glottally released /t/, which i've just
been hearing as my [?]-released-into-syllabic-[n].  (to confound things
further, Wells, Accents of English, reports on a british "glottal
reinforcement", or *pre*glottalization, in various sets of words,
including the "button" type: [?t].)

i see now that Kreidler, the Pronunciation of English (1989), is cagey
about these allophones.  p. 112: "The realization of /t/ may be a
glottal stop [?] or a simultaneous -- or nearly simultaneous -- double
closure, the vocal cords coming together while the apex makes contact
with the alveolar ridge, [?t] or [t?]."  the environment before
syllabic [n] is one of the relevant environments.  (kreidler recognizes
that different dialects have different realizations in different
environments.)

so there are several dimensions of possible variation here -- the
nature of the stop gesture(s), and also (as alice faber suggests) the
nature of the following syllabic.

facts, we need facts.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)