Phonemes of New York Dialect

[David L. White]

> An example that I am very familiar
> with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
> York City area.  In broad outline (and I'll omit irrelevant details) [ae]
> is tensed and raised in front of voiced stops, /m/, /n/, and fricatives
> when these are followed by an obstruent or a major morpheme boundary, so
> that, e.g., the stressed vowel of _adder_ 'snake' is not tensed and raised,
> but that of _adder_ 'adding machine; one who or that which adds' is.  If
> morpheme boundaries are not allowed, we have to posit two phonemes.  Not a
> very satisfying solution.  But wait; there's more.  _I can fish._ (with
> emphatic or contrastive stress on _can_) has no tensing and raising of the
> [ae] if it means 'I am able to fish', but has tensing and raising if it
> means 'I work in a fish cannery'.  Pretty straightforward then:  must be a
> phonemic split.  Not so fast:  It turns out that all words that can have
> [schwa] as their only vowel, *always* have untensed and unraised [ae] in
> their stressed form, at least in one major subdialect.  (This list, which I
> have termed "weak words", includes _am, as, can, had, has, have, than_.)
> Wait, I hear you say; why not talk about "function words" or "closed-class
> words"?  Because, _can't_ *is* always tensed and raised.  What sets it
> apart is that it can never have [schwa] as its only vowel--i.e., it is
> never completely unstressed.

> Anyhow, one phoneme or two?  You be the judge.

        Perhaps I am missing something here (other than the opportunity for
more dutiful slogging), but it seems to me that the facts may be acounted
for if we posit 1) that tensing/raising always occurs before two moraic
consonants (as in "can't, presumably even under high stress), and 2) that
otherwise tensing/raising occurs before one moraic consonant (save voiceless
plosives) in words of middling stress ("can", unlike "can't", always has
either high or low stress, or so it seems to me).  (The second phenomenon
might happen because words of high stress tend to have a sort of circumflex
tone, which in its end part, the part that is relevant when we are dealing
with following consonants, is similar to un-stress.  Thus high and low
stress might pattern together, against middling stress.)  Under this
scenario, agentive "adder" would have to be syllabified as /aed.R/ (or
whatever /R/ is in this dialect), as opposed to /ae.dR/.  This is a bit odd,
but I do not see any way around it, if a remotely unified account is to be
attempted.  The question is whether such a syllabification is permitted.

Dr. David L. White