This is why I have such a hard time keeping up with politics

On the September 6 broadcast of Meet the Press, David Gregory pronounced distrust as if the syllabification was di-strust rather than dis-trust. How can I tell? Because he didn't aspirate the /t/. Listen:

Let's do a little lab.
Put your hand in front of your mouth. Say spit.

Leave your hand there and say pit.

Notice the difference between the two? You should have felt a stronger puff of air after the /p/ of pit. The difference is represented in IPA with a small superscript 'h' on the stop when aspirated.
spit: [spɪt]
pit: [p^hɪt]

The rule simplified: when a voiceless stop occurs initially on a stressed syllable, it's aspirated. Aspiration is that little puff of air. Do the above test to hear the difference in all the following voiceless stops.
pot/spot
kit/skit
top/stop

The [s] before each stop changes the conditioning environment. When the [p] [k] or [t] aren't the first segment in the syllable, they aren't aspirated.

So, some possible explanations of Gregory's unaspirated pronunciation of distrust:

He just messed it up, and normally he would have pronounced it [dɪst^hɹʌst] with the standard syllable initial aspirated /t/. This would make sense because the morphology of a dis- prefix and trust root is probably still intact in his competence.

If that morphology is not intact, Gregory might be syllabifying either on an analysis of a di prefix strust root (very unlikely), or a single morpheme syllabified with maximal onset* -str- on the second syllable. The latter is possible, but not likely because of the strong semantic preservation of a still relevant -trust root.

The standard morphology is intact, but the onset maximization is a stronger influence on aspiration than is syllabification. This is problematic in many ways, but I think it's part of a likely explanation.

The morphology and syllabification are not factors as the st string is simply not an environment that conditions or allows aspiration in Gregory's speech, regardless of onsets and codas.**

Why don't I think this was just a mistake? Because I remember a broadcast from about a year ago, (October 22 2008) when he was talking with Senator Sherrod Brown, (D-OH) that makes it seem this is a feature of Gregory's speech? (about 25 seconds in.)

Le…let me show you a— a piece of reporting from the Boston Globe where they were talking to Youngstown voters and getting their thought [sic] about this election in such a tight race in your state.

Because of his pronunciation of Youngstown it looks like Gregory occasionally leaves off aspiration of the dental stop in the string st, even when morphology would typically split the segments into different syllables. He does not however, block aspiration of /k/ in the word disconnect around 45 seconds in.

Mr Gregory, you've got some 'splaining to do.

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*A simplified theory of onset maximization might be stated as a rule that any segment in a string that can be well-formed on either the end of one syllable or the beginning of another, will be syllabified as an onset segment. The segment in question for this post is the /s/.

**For the sake of relative brevity I'll leave out of this post the discussion of bleeding, counterbleeding, feeding or counterfeeding.

On the spelling bee...t

I misheard it too. The first pronunciation ends so abruptly that it sounds like a glottal stop: the same closure that interrupts the voice and airflow in 'uh-oh' and 'uh-uh'. The vowel length is just long enough to make me think that the speaker is trying to avoid that confusion. Since in AmE the voiceless dental stop /t/ is usually articulated as a glottal stop [ʔ] it's easy to interpret [nʌmnʌʔ] as a surface representation of /nʌmnʌt/. In order to make his interpretation clear, young Master Mishra (from West Lafayette!) makes sure to aspirate the /t/ for [nʌmnʌtʰ].

(Hat tip Jon)

DS Eliot?

I don't feel like taking the time to go through and count every voiceless stop in the following reading by TS Eliot of his poem "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock". If I could I might figure out some sort of a pattern to his alternation of ±aspiration when /t/ /p/ and /k/ are word/syllable initial.



A quick listen reveals that the aspiration is a little stronger and more frequent on /k/. We hear "come" "coat" and "coller" pronounced [k^hʌm] and [k^həʊt] and [k^hɑlə]. Not heavy aspiration. He says "coffee" with much less. It's almost unaspirated.

There's also some evidence that when a /t/ is word final Eliot aspirates it. In the line "let us go and make our visit" the /t/ in "let" sounds slightly aspirated (there's not much flapping going on) and there's a clear aspirated release on "visit" at the end of the line instead of a glottal stop.

Of course there's also the phrase "of insidious intent to lead you" and the /t#/ of "intent" is clearly not aspirated -- which is expected because of the adjacent /#t/ of "to". It's the unaspirated word initial /t/ that sounds most conspicuous.

There's his pronunciation of "days" around 1:40. If an exceedingly intent speaker was to enunciate the consonants in "and days" it would likely come across as [ɛnd^h deɪz]. Normal speech would rarely separate the adjacent Ds. The pronunciation would typically delete the coda resulting in [ɛndeɪz]. Following "and" it's odd to hear a stop of voice. And that's probably what makes his pronunciation sound like [teɪz] to me: I don't expect to hear the break between an alveolar nasal and a voiced alveolar stop so I perceive the -voice as a feature of the stop.

Of course I wonder how specifically affected Eliot's phonology is. Pay attention around 3:00 when Eliot says "to spit out all the butt ends of my days and ways." The reading of a poem is a performance and it's not necessarily relevant to any questions of dialect or production. It's more relevant to questions of perception. The distinction between the aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stop onset is difficult to illustrate to students. I use a [t^h] and they recognize it easily. I get rid of the aspiration and they think it's a [d]. I alternate between [t⁼] and [d] as a minimal pair and they often can't even hear the difference. (Intervocalically it's easier.)

From now on I'll just play this clip for them. If they can't hear that it sounds odd I'll just give up and move on to the next topic.

You say potato I say dadada

Ah the joys of family and little kids -- and obvious input/output phonological data provided by a 19 month old niece. Some basic early phonological processes.

wipes → peeps: /wəɪps/ → [pips]
chip → pip/peep: /ʧɪp/ → [pʰIp]/[pʰip]
grape → peep: /gɹeɪp/ → [pip]
Blake → Pete: /bleɪk/ → [pit]
cookie → teetee: /kʊki/ → [titi]
TV → beebee: /tivi/ → [bibi]
crayons → crots: /kɹeanz/ → [kɹats]
santa → tahta: /sæntə/ → [tʰãta]
michael → cocku: /məɪkl̩ /→ [kʰaku]
buffy → fuffy: /bʌfi/ → [ɸʌfi]/[fʌfi]
sock → cock:/sak/ → [kak]
Mark → cock: /maɹk/ → [kak]

(And she would probably not say [dadada] for 'potato'. Maybe [tito] because she's stuck on 1 and 2 syllable words. And 'tomato' comes out [mimo].)

Of course these pronunciations are changing. She's getting closer and closer to some of the expected phones in her pronunciation. And there's of course a lot of room for variation since her articulation isn't precise.

The aspiration on some of the voiceless stops isn't always clear but I transcribe it where I see it most regularly. I like that altho the /t/ stop of the affricate in 'chip' becomes [p] the release in the affricate is performed as an aspirated release.

There's clear favouring of reduplication in the output and it's almost always regressive. There are a few words that don't pattern like the rest. I would expect her to say [kik] as the output for "Blake" but she introduces two sounds that aren't in the input. Perhaps everyone around here produces a glottal stop in [bleIʔ] and she has learned it as an allophone of /t/.

She says "Santa" with a nasalized [a] but no alveolar nasal as the coda. She is able to articulate the nasal in a coda -- as in corn which she pronounces [kɔn] -- but it might be tougher before a C (given how much more natural the CVCV syllable structure is in early language development).

There are some vowels that show something about the way these adults around here speak. Nobody says kɹænz here altho that's a common pronunciation of crayons. The [a] gets drawn out and thats the sound that she holds onto.

And of course everyone's favourite is when she points at Mark and starts calling him names. He's a nice guy but she apparently thinks he's a bit of a jerk.

Lexical chop shop

I don't follow slang and coinages as closely as some others do, so I'm often pleasantly surprised to come across a word for the first time that has a fairly well-establish role in the lexicon.

So there's a Church of Stop Shopping out there and it's headed by the flailing and annoying Reverend Billy who says of his credentials as a minister: "Well I didn't go to the Yale divinity school...But we've got a church. And we do...perform weddings and baptisms and funerals". And like every good evangelist he's using fear to change minds and inspire souls. What is the catastrophe he warns against? Well this one is new to me: shopocalypse.

Okay so he's doing it tongue-in-cheek...I hope. You never know. It is a nice nod to the perils of consumerism that many acknowledge. But that discussion isn't so interesting to my linguistic self. The word has potential. That's somewhat interesting. Here's what else I notice.

I'd likely pronounce shop as either [ʃap] or [ʃɑp]. In the word shopocalypse the first syllable is unstressed. Vowels in unstressed syllables like to neutralize -- so instead of shop ([ʃap]) + apocalypse ([əpɑkəlɪps]) = [ʃaˈpɑkəlɪps] we get a neutralization of [a] to [ə] for [ʃəpɑkəlɪps].

And such a vowel change is predictable and expected. This might make the portmanteau sound less like shop+ocalypse and more like sh+apocalypse but the spelling (and some common sense) indicates that shop is intended.

Well I can still wonder if the [p] which has now become an onset consonant is the [p] taken from the coda of shop or if it's the [p] taken from the second syllable onset of apocalypse? I'll say it's the [p] of apocalypse only because it's aspirated.

Now the coda /p/ is certainly allowed to change and this could be simple allophonic variation. But I have this weird obsession with portmanteau balance. There's this tiny part of my brain that attaches theories of justice and equality to issues that make me seem crazy if I say too much about them. (Those of you who know my "balance and symmetry" issues might recognize this.) I don't like it when two words are combined and only one of them loses a segment.

I could write about 6 pages on what shopocalypse has going for it and against it in this regard. Phonemically there's some equality but phonetically apocalypse has an unfair advantage. The spelling favours shop because its entire bank is represented even if we grant that the [p] is 'taken' from apocalypse. It's not a great portmanteau on the 'balance' regard. A word like 'liger' (lion+tiger) is pretty good because neither word is completely present. But it's not perfect because lion loses at least 50% of it's letters--maybe 75%; and tiger loses at most 40% of its bank--as little as 20%.

Maybe I've said too much. And I can see some of you slowly backing away.

Aspiration. It's all about persbective.

A friend of mine recently told the story (on her own web log) about teaching her ESL class. For some reason she thought it appropriate to teach them the word "supercalifragilisticexbealidocious." At the very least this word can generate an interesting discussion of what makes a word a word. Would we consider this a lexeme? What is semantic content to this word? I'm pretty sure it's an adjective. And it probably means something like "super." I can't remember the lyrics of that part of Mary Poppins but I remember the tune clearly. It gives me headache. Is there a lyric something like 'lumdiddle-iddle' in there?

So what makes this of interest to me is my friend's admission that she doesn't know how the word is spelled but when her students asked her to write it out for them she chose to spell it "supercalifragilisticexbealidocious." And sure. It works. I knew what word she meant when I read it.

But it's not the spelling I would have used. There's a letter sequence in there that I noticed when I read it: the "xbe". My guess would have chosen "kspi" for that sequence. Why do she and I see that sequence differently? Because I'm a big believer in onset maximization. To say it as simply as I know how...

In English, when stops are the initial sound in a word, they are aspirated. There's a slight puff of air audible right after the release. When an 's' comes before the stop there is no puff of air. (Well -- it's less audible.) Compare the following:

The /p/ in pin and spin
The /k/ in kit and skit
The /t/ in tab and stab

Since English does not differentiate between an aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stop the +/- aspiration alternation is more likely seen as a voiceless/voiced alternation. That is, since voiced stops are not aspirated, an initial unaspirated voiceless stop sounds like a voiced stop.

Now consider the two spellings I suggested for our long word above. Her use of 'x' makes me think that she syllabified the 'ks' as a coda cluster. So her unaspirated bilabial stop sounded like a voiced bilabial stop because she analyzed the onset as a single consonant [...eks.bi.æ.lə...]. Analyzing the [s] as part of the coda she would have expected a [p] to be aspirated [...eks.p^hi.æ.lə...].

Because I love onset maximization I have just assumed that the syllabification is [...ek.spi.æ.lə...]. After the [s] an unaspirated [p] is what I'd expect.

After searching around I find that "xp" is probably the correct spelling. Even so...I syllabify "expert" with a maximized onset and an unaspirated [p].

A while ago on the ADS listserve there was discussion of a local pronunciation of "Wisconsin" heard by some as "Wisgonsin." Several people called attention to the aspiration alternation and suggested that it's primarily an alternation of syllabification. Where most will syllabify the word [wis.k^han.sən] some locals (and surely some non-locals as well) will syllabify it [wi.skan.sən]. Note the difference in aspiration.