Re: Reduction and Grammaticalization

On Dec 27, 2004, at 8:03 AM, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
>> Example:
>> gonna from going to... obviously the word boundary disappeared for
>> them
>> to merge, but still /goInt@/ or something similar must for a start
>> have
>> assimilated nt to get n, a sound change I'm not sure has happened in
>> recent english at least.
> Perhaps not in your dialect, but in most American ones I hear, it
> occurs
> all the time.  The fact that it's ongoing is supported by the countless
> attestations of "internet" as [Inr=nEt].  This might be due to an
> extension of the intervocalic flapping rule in American English to
> cover /ntV/ sequences, or perhaps due to the crosslinguistic markedness
> of nasal + voiceless sequences.
Not just American English in my experience, but North American English
generally... hence the pronunciation of "Toronto" by native
Torontonians(?) as something like [t@'r\A4~ow]


-Stephen (Steg)
  "no es amor
   lo que tú sientes
   se llama obsesión"
      ~ 'obsesión' by aventura