Re: THEORY: Ray on ambisyllabicity

> [huge snip]
> A secondary and subsidiary reason is that even if you controversially (but
> traditionally) assumed that the same phonemes can occur in different positions
> in word/syllable structure (i.e. that structural position is not itself a
> defining property of phonemes) it's still not obvious that final [I] in e.g.
> Mancunian HAPPY and [V] in Cockney FATHER realizes the same phoneme as the
> vowel in HIT and HUT. For example, the HAPPY vowel has a broader allophonic
> range (extending to [E] in e.g. Bolton) than HIT, while Cockney HUT may
> usually be [a] while FATHER (final vowel) is [V] (= turned 'a').
>
> > I am open to persuasion over the ambisyllabic argument, but personally I am
> > still inclined to: [h@.pi] (or [ha.pI]), i.e.
> >          s     s
> >         /|\   /|\
> >        o n c o n c
> >        | | | | | |
> >        h @ 0 p i 0
> >
> > No doubt this will prompt replies, which I shall be interested to read.  I
> > shall be particularly interested to read Dirk's observations on all this.
>
> How would you account for the distribution of [?]?
>    better   [bE?@]
>    winter   [wIn?@]
>    untidy  *[Vn?AIdi]
>    today   *[?@dEI]
>    monitor  [mQnI?@]
Woah, woah, woah!  There are some serious dialectical problems here, which
may be contributing to the confusion.  In my dialect (Central
American) *none* of these have [?].  The initial /t/ is [th]
(aspirated) while the medial ones here are voiced flaps.  This argues for
/t/ being included in the onset of the following syllabe, since, for
example, the same thing can happen across acknowledged word boundaries:

Go to the store.
[g@u d@ D@ stOR]

Based on your other remarks I'm inclined to beleive that the sounds in
question are indeed ambisyllabic, but this particular argument doesn't
hold up.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
"All for the sake of paradise, the tyrants of our generation stacked
bodies higher than Nimrod stacked bricks, yet they came no nearer heaven
than he did."  --J. Budziszevsky