schwa-raising - English = English?

[Mark J. Jones]

Note: This last posting from Mark Jones draws this line of discussion
to a close.

Dorothy Disterheft
List Moderator

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Dear Bob and list members,

just to clarify a few points Bob raises.

1) The non-southern English dialects I was referring to in my anecdote were
not Scottish but northern English, as I said. Southern English /^/ does
correspond to Scottish English /^/. In northern English, the correspondence
across lexemes is to /U/.

2) Bob originally wrote:
> "I was listening to the BBC newshour this noon and heard Lise Doucett...
say very clearly [kImyunikey$In] 'communication' with a very clear phonemic
/I/ (small cap I) as in the proper name Kim."

This contains an apparently phonetic transcription (in square brackets) as
well as a phonemic interpretation. Bob Rankin states that he made no claims
about southern English phonology, yet normally we would expect the phonemic
interpretation to be made in terms of the variety under discussion, not the
researcher's (hence my comments on Tamil: I can say from the point of view
of my English phonology that I hear only one /t/ in that language). I
assumed that Bob's phonemic /I/ was a southern English one. The original
question related to southern British English phonology of which I am a
native speaker, which is why my measurements and comments are relevant. As
a native speaker of that variety, I have and hear schwa in 'communication'.

I think I've made the point that 'interdialectal' mappings do not
constitute a basis for phonological comments, though they are interesting
in themselves.

3) This material is *very* relevant to the "business end" of sound change,
as it relates to the way that speakers map predictable phonetic variation
to an underlying constant (if such things exist, but as the argument here
is based on them, I offer no comment on Roger Lass's interesting
observation). Indeed, the essential questions are whether such variation
exists in the way it has been described and if it does, how is it perceived
in the relevant variety. Experimental phonetic and laboratory phonological
studies have made very important contributions to this field (e.g. the work
of John Ohala).

I would say that although it is widely known that there is lexical
variation across varieties of English in the way that unstressed vowels are
considered to be schwa /@/ or lax /I/ (whether we say 'quickest' with a
final [@] or [I], for example), in southern British English at the present
time, there is no phonological merger between /@/ and /I/, and not even a
phonetic change, though allophonic raised schwa occurs.

For those interested, I submitted my original instrumental results to the
PHONET list for critical review by phoneticians at the same time I posted
them here. At the time of writing, they have been accepted by the list
members without comment. But "no news is good news", as they say.

Mark

Mark Jones
Department of Linguistics
University of Cambridge