DIALECT BOUNDARIES AND PHONOLOGICAL CHANGE

Dialect Boundaries and Phonological Change

Dialect Boundaries and Phonological Change

Introduction

There are some reasons to accept the direct involvement of the New York biphonemic system as plausible even despite the usual interpretation of the diffused system as monophonic and phonological regular. This stem from the fact that the set of speakers being examine here is not large enough to detect systematic differences in the phonology of the diffused system between demographic groups (age groups, communities, or whatever), and so out of necessity this discussion has assumed that a single diffused system is being described. However, there may be reasons for some of the speakers in this small set to have some more direct influence from the New York City system. Thus, some linguists argue that the term can only be properly applied to those consonant clusters that occur within one syllable. Others contend that consonant clusters are more useful as a definition when they may occur across syllable boundaries.

Discussion and analysis

Fred M.'s mother was born in New York City, and it is possible that he will have ended up with a marginal biphonemic system with some traces of New York City characteristics: although syllable structure was never selecting as significant in any of the variable-rules analyses mentioned in this section. All of Fred's lax exceptions are words that are lax in New York City because of syllable structure (baffle, cashew, traffic). Vic R. conceivably is one of the agents of diffusion of the /æ/ system: he is an elderly lifelong Poughkeepsie resident who made frequent trips to New York City for most of his life. It conceivably picked up sporadic features of the New York City system regularize into the diffuse system by the speech community as a whole. However, at this point it clearly entered the domain of speculation far beyond what this sparse data set on the structure of the diffused system can tell me, and had best moved on.

The syllable-boundary pilot experiment

The most fundamental division among English vowels is the difference between short and long vowel phonemes (ANAE)—the short vowels being the class that includes, for example, /i/, /e/, and /?/, and the long vowels including diphthongs such as /ey/ and /aw/, among others. The most salient feature of this split into short (or “checked”) and long (or “free”) phonemes, as has been commented on frequently (e.g., by ANAE, Veatch 1991, Wells 1990), is that a short vowel phoneme must be followed by a consonant wherever it occurs, whereas long vowels can freely occur with or without following consonants. The set of phonemes that share any one-glide component constitutes, a “subsystem”. The short vowels make up one subsystem because they share the absence of a glide component; long subsystems include32 one with the front upglide /y/, one with the back rounded glide /w/, one with the rhotic glide /r/, and one described as the “long and in gliding” subsystem. In the long and in gliding subsystem, whose glide component is denoted with the symbol ...