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.

Putting the intellect in president-elect.

I just started listening to a podcast from last week of the Diane Rehm Show. I could have sworn that I heard her refer to first intellect Obama. I agree that he's a smarty-pants but I didn't quite understand why she would call him that. By the time she finished the sentence I reassembled the pieces and decided that she had almost certainly said President-elect Obama.

I've gone back to listen to the line several times and now I see why I misheard. Instead of a clear three syllable pronunciation of president Rehm utters two syllables. Not only that: instead of a clear [ɛ] nucleus on the first syllable it sounds like she's very close to a syllabic "r" [ɹ̩]. So president elect becomes purse-dent elect. And the nucleus of -dent is neutralized to a [ə] or [ɪ] unstressed vowel. With a slightly stressed final syllable of president we have a phrase, purse-dint elect that sounds a lot like first intellect.

Rehm's speech is affected by spasmodic dysphonia which gives her voice a quavering or halting quality. This can make judgment of the voicing very difficult. In this word it could have caused a very quick devoicing of the /z/ making it [s] and perhaps even devoicing the following /ɪ/ which could give the impression of elision or syncope. Voiceless vowel? Yes. They exist. Even in English. It's not clear, however, that this is what's happening here.

So we listen on to see of this was an error or if it is in fact her regular pronunciation. About two minutes into the program she says it again: [pɹ̩s.dənt].

Mixed in here is her pronunciation of constitutional. Around ninety seconds in she says it with what almost sounds like a syllabic [s]. And a few minutes later she pronounces it with a similar quasi elision of the unstressed syllable. Maybe even both unstressed syllables: It's something like [kants̩tuʃnɫ̩] or [kan(t)s(ə̥)tuʃn̩ɫ̩] or some blend of the two. She could be producing three syllables or four or even five. Four tokens is not enough to figure out the representation.

The main reason I wonder about the syllabification and about those vowels being voiceless, is for the sake of patterning. Would her pronunciation of them be the same if the vowels weren't between two voiceless segments? I wonder too about spasmodic dysphonia as a factor. If this were my dissertation and if I knew enough about the voice disorder I'd take the time to gather the data and figure something out. But for now it'll have to remain an interesting question.

Barnyard humor

I can't believe I sat through an entire 2 hours of The 100 Most Outrageous Moments of All-Time! last night. It was the same battery of TV clips and bloopers that NBC likes to play whenever they don't expect many viewers. Last night it was sort of a ratings tap-out opposite the Grammys.

There's no longer any surprise that the capstone of the show is going to be the witless newlywed's confused response to Bob Eubanks: "In the ass..."

Or at least that's what I figure is being bleeped. The first time I heard about this clip I was in high school and it was in the middle of its urban legendary mutation. It was supposedly a black man who responded quickly (because he was making an obvious joke according to my friend): That'd be up the butt Bob. For some reason Bob always makes it into the legend.

One of the funnier clips is one cameraman's reaction after a Space Shuttle countdown when the boosters aren't igniting and the there's nothing happening on the launchpad. He suddenly swears "Oh @#$% I'm in the wrong place!" and the camera pans frantically over to a shuttle that has already taken off from another launchpad.

And I saw a new one this time. New to me. It has been on YouTube for a while. An announcer calling a horse race almost 20 years ago gives an excited call as the announcers typically do.

But first:

(I don't give away the joke with this preamble. But you can just skip to the video if you don't want the phonological background information.)

There is a phonological rule in English that shortens lengthens a vowel before a voiceless voiced consonant or when word final. So the vowel in sweet is the same as the vowel in Swede -- just shorter. [Update: I absent-mindedly combined this prevoiced/no coda lengthening with the prevoiceless effect of Canadian Raising.]

sweet [swit]
Swede [swiːd]

There are some confusing possibilities. Consider the interaction with a rule that leads to a glottal stop instead of a voiceless alveolar stop at the end of a word. Changing the pronunciation of cute: [kjut] → [kjuʔ].

So let's imagine that Gwyneth Paltrow's little daughter is adorable: we could call her a cute Apple. And 'cute Apple' would likely be pronounced without the [t] sound as a coda. The phrase [kjuʔ.æpl̩] might be confused with 'Cue Apple' a phrase a stage director might say when it's the little darling's turn to make her stage appearance. That possible confusion is because word with a vowel onset will often get a glottal stop onset if the preceding word doesn't end with a consonant: [æpl̩] → [ʔæpl̩]

So how can we tell if the uttered phrase is 'Cute Apple' or 'Cue Apple'? Well that vowel lengthening rule helps. If the vowel is short it would likely be perceived as part of a word with a voiceless stop coda. either [kjut] or [kjuʔ] would be pronounced with a short [u]. But if the vowel is perceptively longer [uː] it would likely be heard as part of a word that has no coda -- just like [kjuː].

So the glottal stop in [kjuʔ.æpl̩] gets syllabified as a coda because of the short vowel -- and in [kjuː.ʔæpl̩] it's syllabified as an onset because of the long vowel (since the syllabification would be in a feeding relationship with the vowel lengthening rule). Now watch this.



The onset [f] makes a clearer onset than does the [h] and might serve as a sort of maximizing segment so [hufˈhaɹɾəd] might give way to [huˈfarɾəd] -- especially when the announcer certainly gets the joke and is willing to play along -- and he really draws out that one [huːː] that sells the resyllabification.

For a pronunciation that is clearly working to avoid the joke just listen to Keith Olbermann's clearly syllabified [ˈhuf . haɹɾəd] here. Notice how short the vowel is in his pronunciation of hoof. And of course the long enough pause completely avoids a mishearing.

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.

A yes no question.

My latest observation about Buffy's language quirks.

When indicating no or a negative without a word it's very common for most speakers to use the phonetic head-shake: "uh-uh" ['ʔʌʔʌ].

I'm not sure I've ever heard Buffy use that exact sequence. It's close tho. The metric foot she uses is identical: a trochee. But Buffy eases into the sound with a nice soft glottal fricative [h]. I guess it would be ['hʌʔʌ]. This reminds me of the kid in my high school choir who I mentioned a long time ago because he sang his solo line "ever more and ever more" as "ever more hand ever more." He always cut the note short after the first "more." In normal speech after such a pause the following vowel would likely have a glottal stop onset. But that can sound awful when singing. So he tried to ease into the vowel.

I've been assuming that Buffy must have a similar aversion to the abrupt onset of a glottal stop. But if you've ever heard her speak you know that abrupt starts and forceful interruptions are not a problem for her. Her reactions seldom hold back or ease into their intensity.

So why the "huh-uh" instead of "uh-uh"? I have a new theory.

Before she took her lofty perch amongst the renaissance scholars Buffy was a mathematician. She believes in inverses and reciprocals as types of opposites and complements and so has a chiastic view of opposed expressions. What is the affirmative phonetic head nod? It's "uh-huh" [ʔʌ'hʌ]. Note that the affirmative is an iamb. The negative is a trochee. Most speakers invert the tonal contour and change the onset of the second syllable but Buffy did enough algebra to know that you can't just split up an expression haphazardly. So she brought the entire syllable along with the tonal shift. Buffy's negative is a more complete inverse of the affirmative.

Yes: [ʔʌ 'hʌ]
No: ['hʌ ʔʌ]

This could be the new productive thesis/antithesis construction.

Stress and Confusion

A few weeks back (in two posts) I addressed a topic related to AmE post-stress intervocalic flapping of [t]. There are some complications to this rule. Some pure examples of this flapping are the AmE pronunciation of wattage batting and fated. I use these examples because on each side of the [t] there is a vowel with no complicating possibility of syllabic [ɻ] or [l] after the [t].

Let us consider another source of complication. The rule as commonly formulated specifies a post stress position. This can explain the lack of flapping in words such as meticulous baton and rotund. There are however examples of pre-stress flapping. The relevant contexts must be expanded to include word boundaries.

We consider a post-stress intervocalic [t] at a word boundary in the following sentences and the flapping rule appears to be at work.

"I'll jump when the mat is in place."
"Put it there please."
"Did you see how fat Elvis got?"

The first sentence has a clear primary stress on the word "mat." The second is not so clear. The primary stress is probably on "there" and I would argue that secondary stress is on "put" so the sentence comprises two trochaic feet. The third sentence might have a clear stress on "fat" but it could also have a clear stress on "Elvis". (depending perhaps on the established discussion topic: if it was already about Elvis, "fat" would probably get primary stress; if the discussion was about fat people, "Elvis" would likely get primary stress.)

This last sentence is evidence that even before a stressed vowel a [t] might undergo flapping. Consider a possible use of emphatic stress when the second syllable of "waited" is misunderstood.

"No...not 'wait-ing' I said 'wait-ed'"

The [t] in these examples may have dual citizenship. The words could be pronounced either with or without the flapping and either would fit into AmE flapping pattern; if we suggest that the flapping depends on syllabification. According to my ear (not the best test, but I trust it) a very common word with a flapped [t] subjected to this alternation of emphatic stress would more likely retain the flapping--I would expect "water" or "butter" to retain it more often than "wattage" or "waited" would with the same emphatic iambic stress.

Phrases like "nothing at all" or "write everything down but only once" show pre-stress flapping even when emphatic stress doesn't change the prosody.

The words "retail" "detail" encourage us to consider the gradable analysis of stress. The un-flapped [t] in these words might be a result of spondaic stress. Because there is clearly a lesser stress on the 2nd syllable of those words we could argue that the environment does not provide the stress differential necessary for flapping. We might also go back to look at syllabification. In either case we should go back to the original rule and scratch stress as a clear binary environment.

No Ap-ologies Necessary.

Well I can't remember exactly what the wording (or the clue) was, but in a category called "World Museums" Alex Trebek read aloud something that indicated the answer would be some type of -ology. I believe a patchwork or mötley form of the clüe was

(something-or-other was offered to this-or-that museum on the condition that they agree to keep on staff an expert in) "this -ology."

No contestant supplied the right response and Alex, true to the rhythm indicated in the clue, provided the answer with a pause after the type and before the -ology. I.e. the answer was anthropology, but he pronounced it with an obvious pause after "anthro-" then he proceeded to finish with "-pology."

So what type of "-ology"? According to Alex's pause, the "anthro-" type.

There's something missing there. The form of the clue and the syllabification of the response imply that the word is split two different ways. Either as anthrop-ology, or anthro-pology.

Is it that one is a phonetic/phonological syllabification while the other is an etymological syllabification? Well the phonological split would probably favour a maximized onset (some will disagree, but I like it as a rule of thumb) and that would explain why Alex provided the response with the pause before the [p]. [æn.θrə.'pa.lə.dʒi].

So it would seem at first that the clue asked for a type of "-ology" because etymologically the suffix is -ology. And other sciences would seem at first to support this as a suffix. bi-ology, psych-ology, anthrop-ology, astr-ology, meteor-ology, zo-ology all end in -ology. And that's the common belief: that -ology meanse "study of." But most people know that the root that means 'life' is bio- no bi-. And most people can figure that the root for star is astro- which makes more sense than astr-. And since we know the Greek for 'word' or 'reason' is logo-s (and some snooping shows us that logia was discourse) we're left wondering why the Jeopordy! writers decided to ask for a type of "-ology". Why take that stranded -o- (which lost an -n in the combinative role) and separate it from its root? This is an unfair question because the -o- in many -ology words is a productive connective form on analogy with the regular -o- ending of Greek nouns in combinative form. In other words, because it is so regular some argue that -ology might be considered a form.

But in our current tale Alex Trebek snubs the last TWO segments of the Greek combinative form άνɵρωπο-. Why? Probably because -pology is not nearly regular enough to be recognized as a suffix. And since the 'o' represents the stressed vowel of the word, without it "-logy" is a rare and uncomfortable pyrrhic foot. On it's own -logy would most likely get a stress on the first syllable and that would require either the odd sounding ['lʌdʒi] rhyming with "fudgy" or the shift to ['ladʒi] rhyming with "stodgy" or a shift to a possible underlying form ['lo^wdʒi] rhyming with...go-gee? flow-gee?

By choosing to give half of anthropology in the clue the Jeopardy! writers typed their way into a corner. It's like when you start an analogy and it turns out to be...a...not...good analogy.

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Afterthought: There is of course a tangent right into the discussion of 'workaholic' which some continue to argue would mean a person addicted to workahol. But why isn't it spelled 'workohol'?