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

[Mark J. Jones]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Dear All,

I'm afraid I can't offer any extra data on this, except to say that to my
phonetician's way of thinking, the unstressed vowels in my Southern British
English 'communicate' and 'Saddam' are definitely not identical in quality.
In the former, the potential schwa is much closer to schwa, and in the
latter it does have a raised quality somewhere between barred [i] and [I].

Although I'm not sure that a) the following comment applies in all cases,
or that b) some kind of phonological change can be ruled out for all
speakers of all varieties, I wonder whether this is actually sometimes just
a phonetic effect due to the high front position of the tongue with
coronals. That would certainly take care of the quality difference in my
own speech. I'm not able to offer an acoustic analysis of formants right
now, but I will do.

all the best

Mark Jones

Department of Linguistics
University of Cambridge