contrastive stress on "an"

[Charles Doyle]

And, in a parallel way, for dialects (like mine) with invariant [D@] for "the," even before vowel-initial words, I wonder is we might adopt the pronunciation [Di] for emphasis?  "I want th' apple" vs. "I don't want a(n) apple, I want THE apple."

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2007 11:25:38 -0500
>From: "Dennis R. Preston" <preston at MSU.EDU>
>
>
>Larry,
>
>Both /ey/ and /aen/ sound good to me; I think the contrastive stress does away with the /n/ requirement in the first (and I don't have the /n/ in colloquial usage anyhow). Fun variationist project: Does contrastive stress on "an" more often realize itself as /ey/ for speakers who don't have the nasal?
>
>dInIs

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