LaGuardia, La Bomba

[Randy Alexander]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 12:16 AM,  <RonButters at aol.com> wrote:
> As I have said here now at least twice, I have no intent to insult anyone.

Sorry, I complained about that before I saw your apologies.  Your
replies to comments somehow don't get connected with what you are
commenting on; a new thread gets started each time you comment.

> The fact is that if people pronounce words without vowel reduction to schwa
> or barred-i in unstressed suyllables they will sound hypercorrect (in layman's
> terms, "stilted") to their auditors. My comments are not ad hominem.

But not every unstressed vowel gets reduced.  Having thought about
LaGuardia a little more, I seem to remember that New Yorkers who don't
reduce the first "a" tend to put secondary stress on it.  Also, speed
is always a factor; these same people may reduce it more as they say
it faster.  In fact, isn't speed the primary factor here?  If you were
to slow down that word enough, wouldn't the schwa turn into a
non-schwa?

> It is also a fact that even linguists are notoriously poor analysts of their
> own speech. People untrained in linguistics are likewise in the dark about
> what they actually say in real-speech situations (probably moreso). No insult is
> intended in presenting this elementary psycholinguistic fact. I am not saying
> that people who misreport their own linguistic behavior are fools or frauds. I
> am just reporting that self-reports--especially from nonlinguists--are known
> to be highly unreliable. This is the sort of thing that one tells one's
> students in the first week of class in Introduction to Linguistics.

I can't dispute that, but I can add that occasionally an inexperienced
person, by virtue of their inexperience, may come up with a viewpoint
that an experienced person would completely miss because the
experienced person is so entrenched in their own viewpoint.

A few days ago I was teaching a high school student.  We were going
through a TV show and got to the word "healthier".  She heard the /th/
as a /d/ and had trouble accepting my saying that it was /th/.  She
isolated the sound and then I realized that she was hearing it that
way because she was paying attention to the fact that there was no
friction (and I completely missed that), where I was focusing on the
dental tongue placement.

--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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