pron. of just

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

Yes, I was treating schwa as the symbol (in IPA and other systems) representing the mid central unrounded vowel. I was also responding to Tom's claim that schwa is a cover term for sounds such as "short i, short u, and short oo." I'm not sure what sounds he means by these labels but I suspect they are the vowels in BIT, BUT, and BOOK, and only BUT would be transcribed with schwa in any phonetic system I'm familiar with (and many would use wedge).  So, I agree with you that schwa may be used in some transcriptions as a shortcut to represent a vowel, especially an unstressed one, that might sometimes be realized as higher, lower, fronter, or backer in vowel space than canonical schwa. Any transcription system is an approximation anyway given the inherent variation in speech (e.g. Herb's example of barred i appearing adjacent palatal consonants). 

Tom seemed to be arguing that schwa was inappropriate in the transcriptions he cited from M-W.com b/c he hears different vowels in these words. In all the cases cited, I find schwa, the mid-central unrounded vowel, to be a plausible representation of the sound found in these words. I'm not dismissing the possibility that in some instances some of those schwas might be realized by a vowel phonetically astray from the middle of vowel space, but when they are pronounced with schwa, they don't draw any attention.*  So, schwa is a reasonable representation of the vowel, and I can't think of any alternatives from the limited phonetic alphabet in place at M-W that would serve as better representations of the unstressed vowels in question.


*I guess the syllabic consonants are an exception here since pronouncing the final syllable of 'little" etc. with a full /@l/ instead of syllabic /l/ might sound odd. But as Herb has pointed out the M-W system is a common transcription alternative, and it has the advantage of more clearly distinguishing syllabic from non-syllabic consonants which might be overlooked if the former were marked with just a diacritic on the consonant.

-Matt Gordon

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Randy Alexander
Sent: Sat 2/28/2009 9:03 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject:      Re: pron. of just
 
On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 5:37 AM, Matthew Gordon <gordonmj at missouri.edu> wrote:
> I suppose that like Humpty Dumpty you're free to have words mean just what
> you choose them to mean, but in phonetics schwa is the name of a particular
> symbol that describes one particular sound and this is how M-W use it in
> their notation.

I've never read anything that said schwa stood for one particular
sound.  Everything I've seen about it either describes it as a range
of sounds; unless you count its designation as a mid-central unrounded
vowel.  Pullum & Laduslaw's Phonetic Symbol Guide (p48) says it is
"used for a range of distinguishable non-peripheral vowels for which
other symbols could also be used".

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

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org