Palin's speech

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:39 AM -0700 9/29/08, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Sep 27, 2008, at 3:38 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>>A couple of trivial, FWIW comments on the LgLog piece.
>>
>>Abstracting away from the fact that "gonna" can represent a broad
>>range of phonetic reflexes, not necessarily only one, back in the day,
>>ca.1972-73, Haj Ross pointed out the creeping replacement of "gonna"
>>[gOn@] by "gunna" [g^n@] in informal white speech in a lecture at
>>M.I.T. It seems to me that this shift is continuing...
>
>yes, of course, "gonna" covers a variety of pronunciations.
>
>as for the [^] vowel, it's the one i have.
>
>arnold
>
Does anyone else remember using Henry Gleason's _Intro to Descriptive
Linguistics_ as a text for Linguistics 101 or the equivalent in the
1960s?  I no longer know where my copy is, but I recall Gleason in
his description of the American English vowel system citing _gonna_
(in some varieties) as the one example of a vowel nucleus consisting
of [o] (with no off-glide of the kind we have in _go_).  Of course
"gunna" speakers with [^] or those who have an open-o [O] in "gonna"
wouldn't help confirm that claim.  I convinced myself at the time
that I did indeed have an [o] rather than [O] or [^] (which would
have been a stressed schwa for Gleason), but now I'm not sure I
really did.

LH

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