Re: USAGE: indefinite "a" before vowel-initial words

Tom w:
> Does anyone know of any articles or research that's been done
> on the distribution of the English indefinite article 'a' vs.
> 'an' when before vowel-initial words?
No.

> You'd think it's obvious
> that "an" is always used in that environment, and indeed that's
> the prescriptive distribution. But I've heard others using
> "a" sometimes prevocalically (and without pausing), and have
> noticed myself using it.
I'm not aware of it occurring systematically in Britain, but
anecdotal reports associate it with young people, especially
Black people, influenced by contemporary African American
culture (especially hip-hop). I speculate (from a basis of
comparative ignorance) that it is a feature of broad AAVE.
Given that AAVE has its roots in the South, and that you
are a Texan, one might further speculate that it is a
phenomenon of the South.

It may be relevant to your paper that in Britain, Britain being
of course largely nonrhotic and so a user of R-liaison, one
sometimes gets /@r/ before a vowel rather than /@n/. This is
an infantilism that seems to get conserved in some urban
basilectal speech, but I don't have any more precise info on
this.

> And now I just found while reading
> about the newly discovered planetoid Sedna an example of the same:
>
> "A alternative definition promoted by astronomers is that..."
>
> (The context is such that it's unlikely that the "A" is being
> used as some kind of bullet or organizational device:
> <http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/sedna/>)
>
> So, it seems to be something more than my crazy "language
> module" acting up again.  Maybe a sound change in progress?
In *writing*, a/an alternations are a bit erratic -- I speak as
a reader of much unproofread undergraduate writing -- because
of the way writing is sometimes but not always 'written down
speech'. That is, when we write we are sometimes but not always
saying the words aloud in our heads. When we're not, you can
get _a_ instead of _an_.

--And.