THEORY: Ray on ambisyllabicity

Ray:
> At 11:14 pm -0600 5/10/00, dirk elzinga wrote:
[....]
> >(Some have even argued that ambisyllabic
> >consonants are really geminates in disguise since they also share the
> >property of belonging to two syllables at once; interesting that in
> >English many of these are written with two consonant letters, as in
> >the word 'happy'.)
>
> Right, I'd like to come back to that last point - not to be contentious,
> but because I genuinely seek enlightenment.
>
> English ambisyllabic consonants masy be "geminates in disguise", whatever
> that means, but they most certainly are not geminates.  The /p/ in _happy_
> /'h@pi/ is one of these so-called ambisyllabic consonants.  It is very
> different from the /p/ in Welsh _hapus_ (happy) /'hap1s/ where /p/ is
> pronounced [pp_h] and gemination is as clearly marked as it is in, e.g.
> Italian _cappa_ (cape, cloak).
>
> Ignoring the question of morae, and just thinking in terms of syllabic
> onset, nucleus and coda, presumably Dirk's analysis above would mean that
> the Welsh word would be represented thus:
>          s     s
>         /|\   /|\
>        o n c o n c
>        | | |/  | |
>        h a p   1 s
>
> Does that mean that the English word is:
>          s     s
>         /|\   /|\
>        o n c o n c
>        | |  \| | |
>        h @   p i 0   [0 = zero element"]   ?
(See an earlier posting from to Dirk, where I say that you need
to introduce a layer of timing units to distinguish the double
timing unit of the Welsh geminate from the single ambisyllabic
timing unit of English.)

> Before I'd read Dirk's letter I'd have shown the Welsh as:
>          s     s
>         /|\   /|\
>        o n c o n c
>        | | | | | |
>        h a p p 1 s
If bottom tier is not taken to be representing timing units in addition
to phonetic content then it may be that the difference is purely
theory-specific. Dirk may know better.

> Also, is the /p/ in English _happy_ really ambisyllabic?  The argument, as
> I understand it, is that the lax vowels (/@/, /E/, /I/, /O/ and /U/) never
> occur in word final position, therefore they do not occur in syllable final
> position.
There are other arguments, too, such as the way the putatively ambisyllabic
segment exhibits realizations associated with coda position -- e.g. T-glottaling
-- and sometimes simultaneously associated with onset. An example is:

    Patrick:  [p&?SRIk]
cf. patch     [p&?S]
    trick:    [tSRIk]

> But this is not entirely the case. In the above I denoted _happy_ as
> /'h@pi/ because that's the way it's usually shown on this list and, as a
> southerner, that's the way I pronounce it.  But over much of northern
> England one hears ['hapI]. The network manager at my College is a young
> lady from Manchester and she invariably pronounces the final -y in sych
> words as [I].  In some non-rhotic varieties of English final -er is
> pronounced [@].  I've heard, e.g. _father_ pronounced ['fAv@] in certain
> London dialects.   When we were school kids we had no difficulty in
> reciting the ancient Greek definite article as [hO], [hej], [tO] where [O]
> is the British [O] in _not_, not the American [Q] or [A].  I _know_ that's
> not the correct ancient Athenian pronunciation - but that's not the point
> here - the point is that we had no problem pronouncing short, lax [O] in
> word final position.
>
> In other words I do not find the argumernt that the lax vowels /@/, /E/,
> /I/, /O/ and /U/ cannot occur in English except in blocked syllables well
> founded.  Therefore, I am not convinced (yet) by the ambisyllabic argument.
> We did discuss this once before on this list.  Certainly I cannot accept
> the syllablic division [h@p.i] as some suggested.
"having no difficulty" in pronouncing something in a certain way does not mean
that that pronunciation is OK for English. (E.g. "bowng" is not an OK English
word, but it's easy to say.)

As for the point about [V] (= your [@]) and [I] in word-final position, I don't
think it's valid (I mean: it's pertinent & well-taken, but turns out to be
invalid), for two reasons. The main reason is that the generalization
about lax vowels can be restated in one of various ways which remain arguments
in favour of ambisyllabicity but rule out your counterexamples as irrelevant.
For example:
  I.  stressed syllables containing a lax vowel must be closed
  II. stressed syllables must contain a minimum of two segments in the rhyme

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?@]

--And.