Raising of unstressed vowels in Eng from schwa to...?

[Blaine Erickson]

Cecil Ward wrote:

>  I expect that lots has been written about the raising of schwa vowels in
>  unstressed syllables to /I/

Although I am not familiar with the current state of BBC English, I
strongly suspect that the vowel in question is not small-cap I, but
is the high central vowel barred i. In many varieties of North
American English, the word 'just' is often realized with barred i,
though when stressed or in slower speech it comes out with schwa.
This same change may affect other unstressed schwas, though not
necessarily all of them (i.e., I don't know or understand all the
conditions for this change).

Part of why I am skeptical of the change schwa to small-cap I is that
this would require the change of two features--the addition of
palatality ([-pal] -> [+pal]) and the changing of the height ([-hi]
-> [+hi]), and I see no motivation for the former. On the other hand,
the change schwa -> barred i requires only a change in height ([-hi]
-> [+hi]). In English, this change appears to preferentially affect
schwas in syllables that are not only unstressed but have been
further reduced for prosodic reasons (your 'Saddam' example
illustrates this nicely). The motivation here is obvious: barred i is
even "less" of a vowel than schwa (i.e., shorter duration and less
sonorant, all else being equal), and we all know how much English
likes to reduce its unstressed vowels. Furthermore, the change schwa
-> barred i appears to have occurred historically in Vietnamese.

Perhaps the best reference on how vowels change is:

Donegan, Patricia J. 1985 [1978]. On the Natural Phonology of Vowels.
New York: Garland.

This is the published version of her Ohio State University dissertation.

Sorry I can't help you with more references.

Best wishes,

Blaine Erickson
erickson at piercingsuit.com
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