LINGUIST List 10.44

Mon Jan 11 1999

Sum: American /t/

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

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Message 1: Summary: American /t/

Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1999 11:45:48 -0000
From: Dan Faulkner <Dan.Faulkneraculab.com>
Subject: Summary: American /t/

Dear Linguist,

I recently posted a question about various realisations of phoneme /t/ in American English (AE). The response was huge, and very useful indeed, and therefore this is a big summary. First of all, I would like to thank everyone who mailed me with their thoughts - I started out by replying to everyone, but there were just too many in the end, so I'm sorry if I ignored you, I am very grateful. Those kind people were (in no order):

Kathleen Brannen Damon Allen Davison John Reighard Stan Whitley John Thiels Jakob Dempsey Donn Bayard Rina Kreitman Frank Gladney Rebecca Larche Morton Earl Herrick Henry Rogers Gerald B Mathias Alice Faber Marc Picard John Hellerman Laura J Downing Judith W Fuller Peter T Daniels Scott Hersey Linda Shockey James Kirchner Larry Trask

Please accept my apologies if I have not included your name. I think I have everyone though!

Before I go into detail, there are a few general points that should be made.

One is that the notion of a General American English accent seems to be unpopular, and possibly inaccurate - apparently a major isogloss dissects the area that supposedly represents the General American accent region, so something less ambiguous might be appropriate.

A second point is that there is obviously a lot of regional/dialectal/accentual variation, and, perhaps as a result of this, all of my proposed transcriptions were okayed by at least one native respondent.

A third point that came out very strongly was that pronunciation of these types of sequences is strongly influenced by speaking style (formality) and speaking rate, meaning that there is some extralinguistic influence, and a degree of intra- as well as inter-speaker variation in the phonetic realisation of /t/ in various contexts.

The various realisations seem to be fairly easily predicatable, and become complicated only in alveolar nasal contexts.

Finally, there was some difficulty caused by the symbols with which I chose to transcribe the words. However, bearing in mind that machine-readable ASCII phonemic alphabets (such as SAMPA, MRPA) are inadequate for transcribing fine phonetic detail, most people were able to see the salient information, and commented very helpfully on it.

Okay, here is a summary of the responses to each case I cited:

(1) HATING / h ei' D i ng /

Everyone said that this was okay.

(2)(a) WINTER / w i' n R / (b) ENTITY / e' n D ii / (c) QUANTITY / k w aa' n D ii /

Just about everyone said that these are wrong. (2a) was an appropriate transcription for WINNER, but not WINTER. Contrary to what I had thought initially, these two are not usually homophonous, and rather than eliding the /t/ altogether, the /nt/ phonemic sequence is most frequently realised as a nasalised alveolar flap /D~/.

A few respondants did say that total elision of the /t/ was acceptable, but these were in the minority, so I will assume that elision would be a non-standard phenomenon. The full realisation of phoneme /t/ was also deemed acceptable for careful or formal speech.

One really interesting - and purely co-incidental - side effect of the example words I chose came up. Most respondants stated that some reduction of the /t/ (usually to /D~/) was appropriate for (2a) and (2c), but not for (2b). ENTITY was considered too formal or too highbrow a word to undergo any reduction. I find this remarkable - is it sociophonetics?! I would have thought that an accent or dialect feature would mean that certain sequences of sounds were always pronounced in a given way, irrespective of the meaning (and in this case the extra-linguistic meaning!) of the word. However,

"Wow! I am surprised by this. I seem to have real /t/s very easily in this (ENTITY). Quite surprising to me. It may be that this is a fairly academic word which usually gets a more careful pronunciation."

"These both sound "off", ENTITY moreso than QUANTITY. But this could be because the words are from different vocabulary strata..."

"But I have a special problem with `entity'. This is a word I never use in ordinary relaxed conversation. I only use it in more formal contexts, such as when I'm lecturing, and then I'm obliged to pronounce it as [e' n t t ii]."

Another theory was that (2a) and (2c) might have been learned before their spelled forms were known, but if (2b) was learned with the spelling (i.e. a visible T), then the full phoneme somehow had to be there. However, I suppose this is a topic for another time....

(3)(a) IMPORTANT

/ i m p oo' R ? n t / / i m p oo' R D n t /

(b) POTENT

/ p ou' ? n t / / p ou' D n t /

(c) LATENT

/ l ei' ? n t / / l ei' D n t /

There was concurrence that the transcriptions with the glottal stops were the SORT of thing that was going on. From the responses received, it seems most likely that there is in fact an alveolar gesture, but that the /t/ is unreleased. In addition, the preceding vowel is glottalised. These two facets occur instead of a full glottal stop /?/. It also seems that there is no subsequent schwa, and that the /n/ is in fact syllabic.

A few people said that they had heard the right hand pronunciations above, but the general feeling was that these were non-standard. Therefore the best transcription would seem to be (where /T/ is an unrelased /t/ and /N/ is a syllabic /n/):

/ i m p oo' R T N t / / p ou' T N t / / l ei' T N t /

I also asked for references concerning the pronunciation of American English, and the following article/books were suugested:

One non-technical (but accurate) source for ESL teaching is "Pronouncing American English" by Ann Cook, published by Barron's.

Wells "Accents of English."

Picard, M. "English Flapping and the feature [vibrant]" (journal name unknown - sorry)

Rogers, H "Theoretical and Practical Phonetics",Copp Clark, Toronto, 1991.

"Teaching American English Pronunciation", it's Cambridge/Oxford, but might be hard to get in the UK

there's a new book on language ideology in the US (re English and dialects) called "English With An Accent" (Routledge) by Rosina Lippi-Green.

Once again, thankyou very much for the replies and for the information. I am sorry if I have not included all the information that was sent to me, but I hope that I have filtered out the best bits.

Dan Faulkner

Computational Spoken Language Scientist Tel +44 1908 273 933 Fax +44 1908 273 801 http://www.aculab.com