Phonemes of New York Dialect

[Leo A. Connolly]

Sombody wrote:

>> An example that I am very familiar
>> with concerns the tensing and raising of [ae] (that is "ash") in the New
>> York City area.  ...

David White replied:

>        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.

This solution seems wrong, since with the sole exception of non-standard
_yeah_, raised and tensed [E:] and normal [ae] both occur only in closed
syllables.  Neither do I see what morae have to do with it.  Stress?  Maybe,
since it is contrastive stressing of the normally unstressed modal that
underlies such forms as _if I [kaen]_ ('am able') beside _if I [kE:n] (put up
tomatoes).  A neat minimal pair, that,. since the stresses on the two forms are
equal.

Leo Connolly