Re: THEORY: ambisyllabicity & gemmination (was: final features,moras, and roots)

At 7:14 pm -0400 7/10/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>> 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.
>
>Depends on dialect, I suppose.  For me, it's pretty clearly
>ambisyllabic, or at least belonging to the previous vowel (also I use
>/&/, not /@/).
Sorry - my error.  I mean /&/ in fact (or /{/ in SAMPA).  I should also
have included /V/.  Guess I was a bit tired at the time.

[...]
>
>In fact, my question would be whether it has any connection with the
>*following* one.  It's not *['kr_0&p_hi], the /p/ seems to behave solely
>as a coda in such words.
I wouldn't expect [p_h] to occur unless one had a true geminate as in Welsh
_hapus_.  But that an intervocalic plosive does not behave the same as a
word initial one is not surprising, indeed it is common. Spanish /p/, /t/,
/k/ are clearly voiceless when initial, but when intervocalic they take on
some voicing so that the often sound more like [b], [d] and [g] to English
speakers; and the voiced plosives /b/, /d/ and /g/ are plosives when
initial, but become fricative when intervocalic.

In England, initial /t/ is [t_h] in all dialects AFAIK, but intervocalic
[t] is commonly [?] in many regions and [r] in some areas.

To Brits, most Americans seem to voice intervocalic /p/ and /k/, while
intervocalic /t/ and /d/ both seem to become a flapped /r/.

All these phenomena are environmentally conditioned by the fact that there
is a preceding syllable ending in a vowel, but the syllabic division I've
always seen given puts the consonant in question as the onset of the second
syllable.  What seems telling to me is that the intervocalic sounds above
do not always occur as syllable codas.

But what I'm really wanting to see is how Dirk's notation which he used for
Japanese _hatten_, works out with English _happy_ and Welsh _hapus_ where,
although the {p} is written only once, it is certainly geminated and the
English {pp} is not.  The English is ['h&pi] or ['hapI], depending on
dialect, whereas the Welsh is ['happ_h1s] or ['happ_h1s] depending on
dialect.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
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