Fw: [ADS-L] "slurring"?

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:11 AM -0500 2/23/09, Alice Faber wrote:
>Randy Alexander wrote:
>>On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 1:59 AM,  <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
>>>Allegro speech is not "careless" nor is it
>>>"slurred". It follows rules that vary from
>>>dialect to dialect. Speech in which no allegro
>>>rules are followed is not "careful," it is
>>>unusual, and sounds stilted.
>>
>>So we have an acceptable name for one end of the spectrum.  What about
>>the other?  I take it "unusual" and "stilted" don't fit the bill.  I
>>confess to, like Bill, have used "careful" and "slurred" to describe
>>two ends of the phonetic speech change spectrum.  Actually I go past
>>"careful" into dictionary pronunciation, where one separates each
>>word.
>>
>>There are environments where this careful (until we have a more
>>acceptable term) speech is not stilted, and naturally comes out, such
>>as when one is speaking (or shouting) in a noisy environment, or when
>>you have to repeat something for someone the umpteenth time because
>>they didn't understand it (but should have) no matter how you rephrase
>>it.
>
>Björn Lindblom refers to this mode as "hyperarticulated". (His interest
>is in the geometry of vowel spaces in modal, hypoarticulated, and
>hyperarticulated speech,
>
And (although maybe that was in the
hypoarticulated part of Alice's message following
the last comma) hyperarticulation is relevant for
consonants too, as when I create a contrast
between "ladder" and "latter" to disambiguate
them that isn't there in my normal pronunciation
of them as homophones, or ditto "whether" and
"weather" even though the latter pair doesn't
involve an allegro reduction.  Or, for the
allegro category, "No, I was asking if you had
eaten yet, I wasn't insulting your religion."

On the other hand, I suspect that for non-allegro
reductions and neutralizations other distinctions
of this type aren't usually made via
hyperarticulation, e.g. when most speakers (not
me!) would end up saying something like "No, I
meant 'marry', not 'merry'" or "No, I meant
'merry', not 'Mary'".  Contextual disambiguation
is always possible without hyperarticulation, of
course:  "marry as in 'wed' not 'merry
Christmas'", "writing pen, not stick pin".

LH

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