LINGUIST List 5.516

Wed 04 May 1994

Misc: Dia- vs. idio-lectal allophony, This & that

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. H.Stephen Straight, Q: Dia- vs. idio-lectal allophony?
2. Angus Grieve-Smith, Shtrange speech
3. Steven Schaufele, Re: 5.509 'this' vs. 'that'
4. , Re: 5.509 This & that

In his _exemplary_ /s/ -> [S] summary (5.507), Dan Moonhawk Alford quotes Don
Churma's posting to him: "I'm not sure I'd refer to this as an 'alternation':
it seems quite systematic for a given speaker." To this Alford responds: "I
agree, though I meant 'alternation' in a dialectal rather than idiolectal
sense."

Other postings Alford received, and my own experience with the phenomenon,
do suggest that individuals can indeed systematically assimilate the places of
articulation of /s/ /t/ and /r/ in the /str/ cluster [N.B.: that's _my_
interpretation of the instances I've heard] without realizing that others who
speak their "dialect" do not do so. Another instance of this is the
[sandwIch], [samwIch], [sandrIch], [sangwIch] tetrotomy observed in at least
one nuclear family of my acquaintance.

Unless I'm mistaken, this distinction between dialectal and idiolectal
allophony has not been widely noted or cogently discussed, although it would
appear to have profound implications for the claim that phonology describes
what the speaker knows about the sound system. For if "allophony" can be
merely dialectal, reflecting phonetic variation within a group even though that
variation is found in no single speaker in the group, then what is the
psychological status of the description itself, especially if speakers show no
sign of recognizing the allophony, even when it sets their _own_ speech off
from their con-dialectals?

Any ideas about how to handle this?

H. Stephen Straight <sstraighbingvaxa.cc.binghamton.edu>
Binghamton University (SUNY) <sstraighbingvaxa.bitnet>

P.S.: I'm grateful for Schiffman's posting to Alford citing Labov to the
effect that the /s/ -> [S] process may be a Neapolitan Italian contact effect:
The people I know who do it are from Italian-American communities, but not in
S.Phila. but rather upstate NY.

 I regret being too busy to contribute before the summary went
out, but I was going to say that the pronunciation of esh in "street"
is definitely associated in my mind with the Long Island suburbs of
New York. I wish I could say I'd done a comprehensive survey of the
pronunciation of young people from this area, but perhaps someone at
any East Coast university could help. I would definitely call it
dialectal based on my impressions, though.

 This is not to say it can't exist in more than one area,
though. If it's a solution the mind finds to a phonological problem,
there's no reason minds in two places can't think of it. I've
actually heard it in the acrolectal speech of a Chicago Black woman
who had never set foot on the Island, although Black English scholars
have told me that in more relaxed speech, Blacks in Chicago say
"skreet."

 The Hollywood English phenomena I would call retroflex
coarticulation, actually, which I've also heard in the East Texas
speech of Ross Perot ("Now y'shee, ah love thish country..." :-)).
Any documentation on this?

--
 -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
 grvsmthuchicago.edu

Message 3: Re: 5.509 'this' vs. 'that'

John Koontz recently reported,

> Well, my American perspective is, we ask "Who is this?" because "Who is
> that?" implies that the answerer detects the presence of a third party,
> e.g., an eavesdropper, or somebody in the room with the caller, and wants
> the caller to identify them. Alternatively, the caller has somehow already
> posed a question concerning the identity of a person (which seems unlikely)
> and the answerer wants to know who that person is. "This" is the caller;
> "that" is someone else.

For what it's worth, i remember a long-distance phone conversation -- must be
almost 20 years ago now -- between myself and a friend, both of us native
speakers of American English, at the beginning of which were several iterations
 of the following loop:

'This is Steve.'
'No, this is Bob.'
'No, this is Steve.'
'No, this is Bob.'
etc., with each instance of 'this' apparently referring to the speaker. Given
that my friend (Bob) was known for his sense of humour, it's rather difficult
for me at this late date to judge at what point in this cycle the whole thing
became a deliberate joke on his part, or whether it was ever anything else.

Sincerely,
Steven
--
Dr. Steven Schaufele fcoswsnytud.hu
Room 119
Research Institute for Linguistics (Department of Theoretical Linguistics)
Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Eotvos Lorand University)
P. O. Box 19
1250 Budapest
Hungary

*** O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum! ***
*** Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis! ***

Message 4: Re: 5.509 This & that

More than once I've engaged in a telephone dialogue like this:

Me (answering the phone): Hello.
Caller: Hello. Who's this?
Me: Who's _this_?
Caller: Oh, sorry; this is X.
Me: This is Anne.

This, obviously, wouldn't happen to a British speaker.

Anne Loring
University of Minnesota