pre-velar /ae/ raising (was: slang/slant)

[Matthew Gordon]

Labov's isogloss in Map 11.9 is pretty conservative considering the evidence
in their Chap. 14.

Anyway, you raised another interesting question about the putative
incompatibility of the low back (cot/caught) merger and the NCS.
Theoretically they represent alternative strategies to overcrowding in that
neighborhood of vowel space. In actual practice, however, they can coexist
at least if the merger comes first. Tivoli Majors and I have been
investigating some people from the outskirts of St. Louis and I remember
hearing similar people in Fargo (the place, not the movie) who have the
merger and the NCS. Basically they just front the merged class so that both
cot and caught have a centralized vowel. I think it's more of an open
question whether the merger could spread in an area already infested with
the NCS. The fronting of /a/ is so salient that it might prevent the merger.
As they say, once you go from 'block' to 'black', you never go back.



On 11/2/06 3:20 PM, "Joseph Salmons" <jsalmons at WISC.EDU> wrote:


> Also, once we get to far western Wisconsin, we find some cot/caught
> merger and it's really widespread in Minnesota from what I can tell.
> Aren't such speakers by definition not NCS speakers? (That's a real
> question -- I'm still pretty new to a lot of angles on this topic.)
>

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