Surprise

[Herb Stahlke]

There may be another phenomenon involved here.  In iambic words like
"surprise" in which the second syllable begins with a fortis stop, the
vowel of the first syllable may devoice in allegro speech.  You may
hear this in words like "Detroit."  Because of the devoicing it's
pretty much impossible to hear a rhotic effect on the voiceless vowel.
 This, of course, doesn't address the question of what happens to the
rhotic coloring of the schwa in "surprise" when the schwa is voiced.

Herb

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 11:21 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Surprise
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Feb 17, 2009, at 7:57 AM, Ron Butters wrote:
>
>>
>> This is variable in my speech, though the /r/ tends to be realized
>> only in nonallegro speech. I expect this is true of most rhotic
>> dialects. I don't THINK that I have deletion in "surmise"--but I am
>> wary of self-reports (maybe it gets weakened variably in allegro
>> speech).
>
> the cases where r is dropped (in rhotic dialects, in unaccented
> syllables) are almost entirely words with an r later in them.  so
> "surprise" is a good candidate, but "surmise" is not.
>
> arnold
>
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