[Ads-l] Trying again

[Geoffrey Steven Nathan]

I have no idea why this came out as gibberish, but I'm sending this again as non-html. Let's see what happens.


I think we've been over this ground in the past. (Warning: detailed phonological description ahead)

As I understand it, the allophone of /t/ before /n/ in many speakers of American English is a glottal stop, regardless of whether the /n/ is syllabic (as it is in 'sentence', 'Clinton') or in an onset (as it is in 'catnip', 'whatnot' etc.)

The controlling feature is 'unreleased'. For many (I would guess most) Americans, /t/ is unreleased and pronounced as a glottal stop when in syllable coda followed by a consonant other than /l/. New York speech is distinctive in that the /l/ exception does not apply, so that even 'bottle', 'cattle' also have glottal stops. Thus most speakers have glottal stops in 'what-for' (as in 'I'll give you what-for'!), 'Batman', 'white shoes' (a famous half of a minimal pair with 'why choose'), and even 'Great White Way' (i.e. even before glides).

An additional complication is that I've observed (but, to my knowledge nobody has formally studied this) that in words like 'Clinton' and 'sentence' the *first* syllable entirely loses the /n/, in that the vowel is not nasalized and the /n/ is elided, which if frequently is before voiceless consonants. That is, it comes out as [sɛʔns] (for those for whom this won't render: [sE?ns])

Geoff




     
 Geoffrey S. Nathan
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