contrastive stress on "an"

[Dennis R. Preston]

Therda been a big problem for any snot-nosed outlander whoda tried to
fix us up.

>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>Subject:      Re: contrastive stress on "an"
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>At 11:25 AM -0500 11/13/07, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>>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).
>
>Right, as Ron also pointed out, there's often a shift to /EY/ here
>before vowels for speakers who do differentiate the "a" and "an"
>allomorphs in unstressed contexts.  I could be wrong about the
>aversion to stressed /AEN/; I'm just reporting my own usage and
>possibly misprojecting it on others, although the shift to /EY/ would
>be consistent with this aversion.
>
>Of course in metalinguistic contexts, e.g. a teacher "correcting" a
>student's nonstandard usage--"No, Dennis, it's not A apple, it's AN
>apple"--there's no problem with (or alternative to) stressing the
>"an".  Although there might be a problem for the teacher.
>
>LH
>
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--
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himself [sic] in his own true character - that is, as an ignorant man
thinking, actively utilizing his small share of knowledge. Alfred
North Whitehead

Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of English
Morrill Hall 15-C
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824-1036 USA
Office: (517) 353-4736
Fax: (517) 353-3755

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