Re: USAGE: VOT and the status of /r/

Tristan wrote:
> Tom wrote:
> > Indeed,
> > the number of speakers of nonrhotic English dialects in the
> > United States, though a small minority there, exceeds the
> > entire population of Australia,
>
> Really? I thought non-rhotic American was practically dead?
Oh, far from it, but its long-term viability varies from region
to region.  I would say it is most endangered for Southern whites:
there it tends to be associated with hickishness and a lack of
education. In the Northeast, it seems to be far more stable.
I think John Cowan once said that, in New York, if you grew up
in the City, and you have more than shallow roots there, you
are generally likely to command both rhotic and nonrhotic varieties,
switching between them as formality would indicate. (One of the
members of our department has a quite striking Northeastern
nonrhotic accent, and is quite happy to put it on for display. :))
And then, of course, there are the 40 million or so African-Americans,
for most of whom a nonrhotic dialect is natural, but they use
rhotic speech for out-group communication. This widespread
bidialectalism makes it difficult to estimate exactly how many
people are basically nonrhotic, but the I would guestimate the
number to reach, conservatively, the 80-million mark or so.

> > and then that's not including
> > the 50 or so million people in the UK who speak nonrhotic
> > dialects.
>
> Well, I was of the understanding they mostly did the same as me
> except amongst more conservative speakers. At least the concept
> of 'intrusive r' is a British one, implying that they must have
> at least a sizeable minority who have puts the unwritten R in to
> 'law and order'.
Yes, they do have such a minority, but my understanding is that
it is by no means universal as you describe for Austrlian dialects.
Perhaps some Britisher -- Ray? you reading this? -- can give us
a better estimate.

> > In OT, the quality of epenthetic segments is supposed to be a
> > result of constraint interaction, and is not written directly
> > into the grammar. So, e.g. if one encounters an instance of
> > hiatus, and the other principles of the grammar say it's better
> > to epenthesize a consonant than to delete one of the vowels,
> > the choice between [j], [t], [w], [h], etc. is supposed to be
> > decided by how highly that language ranks the constraint
> > favoring stops versus glides, or labials versus coronals,
> > etc. But since the set of constraints is not symmetric
> > (i.e., there are some constraints militating against retroflexes,
> > but not necessarily any militating against coronals), one
> > does not expect to see a marked segment like [r] ever arising
> > through constraint interaction.
>
> So there's general rules about what sounds can be used in hiatus
> (in OT at least)?
Not rules, constraints.  The idea of OT is that surface phonology
is the epiphenomenon of constraints on output, with constraints
ranked and competing to rule out potential output candidates.
So, outputs are supposed to satisfy all constraints at some level,
but may violate some constraints if it serves to satisfy a higher
ranked constraint.

> (BTW: I'm not sure quite how relevant your comment
> on retroflexes is, and this is all still going above my head, but I
> thought that in general in non-rhotic Englishes /r/ was an alveolar
> approximate, not a retroflex one. I would think an alveolar approximate
> would be a good choice for hiatus-avoidance in non-high vowels, but
> I could be biased by my own speech. I can't comment on the truth of
> this other than what I've read though.)
Again, that's not my understanding of the dialectological literature.
There are indeed two different <r> approximants, one retroflex and one
'bunched', but I know of no literature suggesting some relationship
to rhotic versus nonrhotic dialects.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637