[VAR-L] The Britishisms are coming
Damien Hall
damien.hall at NEWCASTLE.AC.UK
Fri Sep 28 07:59:31 UTC 2012
PLEASE NOTE MY NEW ADDRESS
Thanks for the (?)further analysis, Arnold! (The question-mark is because the analysis is an advance on what I proposed in my rule for glottal(is)ed /t/ in words like _important_, _Clinton_, _Scranton_, but not of course an advance on what was already known.) I'm going to take the weak way out and say "it's not really my area", or I would have included syllabic /n/ specifically in my rule. It's also worth saying, though, that the person who thought that /t/-glottalisation in such words was new in American English, thus sparking my whole post, was not me but Ben Yagoda.
Ben's phonological Recency Illusion has also received a thorough going-over on the Variationist List, much of it aiming in the same direction as Arnold's analysis:
http://j.mp/VAR-L
You can see the archive of messages without being a list-member, but anyone here who'd be interested in joining the debate on VAR-L would be welcome to join up!
The article in question is the same one from the online _BBC Magazine_ that Benjamin wrote about here, a couple of hours later:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19670686
Most of the points it made were lexical, and well-supported with evidence: the phonological bit that has sparked this excellent debate and clarification is only three lines long ...
Damien
VAR-L owner
--
Damien Hall
Newcastle University (UK)
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, 'Towards a New Linguistic Atlas of France'
Tel. +44 191 222 8521
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