Re: Schwas in America

Sally Caves said:
>
> LOL!  I've been thinking about all the swallowed syllables in the English
> I
> speak.  When speaking to the cat, "Look out!"  always comes out /kout/.
> Often with a swallowed final "t".  When responding to something I say, my
> husband generally responds /m'ke/ for "okay."  There's always that little
> weird "m."  I shouldn't complain.  He could say "nope!"
>
> It's a word the derivation of which I wonder about.  Whence the final "p"?
> An exaggerated glottal stop?
There's a form of "no" that has a phonetically short /o/ and ends in an
unreleased glottal stop. This form is typically used in a one-word
utterance. In my speech, the glottal stop is often immediately followed by
(or even articulated simultaneously with, sometimes) closure of the lips
(and I assume that my speech is not idiosyncratic in this respect). That
final lip closure would the (unreleased) /p/ that wound up getting
represented in "nope".

That would mean that "nope" is one possible realization of the
one-word-utterance form of "no" that has the shortened vowel and the
glottal stop. There are probably several usage variables that control this
variation (with vs. without unreleased /p/); they're not interchangeable
in my speech. I could make some guesses based on introspection, but it'd
be better to try to find the forms in a corpus of spoken American English.


-- Mark