Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 15:51:16 -0500

From: Mark Mandel Mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]DRAGONSYS.COM

Subject: Summary: AmEng external sandhi



I asked on the LINGUIST List (#8.1442) and on ADS-L (the American

Dialect Soc'y list):



I am looking for descriptions of external sandhi in American

English, especially such pronunciations as are often written

"gotcha" (for canonical "got you"). I will post a summary to the

list if there is sufficient interest.



Many people kindly replied. Here is a summary of their replies:



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Peter T. Daniels grammatim[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]worldnet.att.net wrote:



You need the work of a short-lived school of phonology called

"natural generative phonology," which flourished(?) in the early

1970s in connection with the generative semantics school centered

on the University of Chicago. The key name is David Stampe, whose

dissertation was originally called "What I did on my summer

vacation" but was retitled "A dissertation in natural phonology."

You'll find articles in this genre in the Proceedings of the

Chicago Linguistic Society from those years, and a volume from a

Parasession on Natural Phonology in 1975 or so.



[And I have the CLS volumes from that period at home, somewhere,

from my Berkeley years. -- MAM]



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James Giangola jamesg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]genmagic.com recommended _Patterns of

English Pronunciation_ by J. Donald Bowen (UCLA), 1975, provided

some samples, and even offered to fax me the relevant pages.



[Thanks, James, but I found a copy at MIT.]



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Ben Brumfield benwbrum[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]berserker.lensflare.com pointed out a

regional example:



Piedmont Virginia (Pittsylvania County, at least) features the case of

/rajc^ yi:r/

Ri-Cheer

For "Right Here"



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Mel Resnick resnickmc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]centum.utulsa.edu pointed me to his

article:



Resnick, Melvyn C. "The Redundant English Phonemes /c^,j^,s^,z^/."

Linguistics 86 (1972): 83-86.



Those symbols in the title are of course in place of the usual

wedge symbols.



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Aaron Drews aaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ling.ed.ac.uk recommends "any introductory

linguistics text for a description of GA (General American)

sandhi."



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The redoubtable Arnold Zwicky zwicky[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ling.ohio-state.edu

advised:



the problem here is that there's so much literature. for the

GOTCHA stuff, one good place to start is joel rotenberg's 1978 mit

dissertation, The Syntax of Phonology.



[And whaddya know, Arnold, I found that one at MIT too!]



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Betty Phillips ejphill[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]root.indstate.edu pointed me to



Holst, Tara & Francis Nolan. 1995. "The influence of syntactic

structure on [s] to [ ] assimilation." _Phonology and Phonetic

Evidence: Papers in Laboratory Phonology IV_. Eds. Bruce Connell &

Amalia Arvaniti. Cambridge UP. 315-333.

(where [ ] = "esh")



[Also found at MIT.]



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Alan Grosenheider alang[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]u.washington.edu and

KIM DAMMERS kdammers[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]hotmail.com

mentioned some more English examples, and

Kate McCreight katemccreight[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]alum.mit.edu

described some work she's currently involved in.



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My thanks to all!



Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist : mark[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dragonsys.com

Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 965-5200

320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02160, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/

Personal home page: http://world.std.com/~mam/