Amanda,
Among urban AAVE speakers that may well be the case, but it's less
likely to be an explanation when the pattern is found among young middle
and upper middle class white women. The influence may still be hip-hop,
but I've been hearing it longer than hip-hop has been a major cultural
force.
Herb
I have noticed the same pattern (the glottal stop in words like "Martin"
and
"didn't") among the urban African American adolescents I work with in
Pittsburgh. When I spoke to a couple professors in our linguistics
department who research US language variation about it, they suggested
possible links to pronunciation patterns found in west coast hip-hop
music -
supposedly there is some research on this topic, but I am not familiar
with
it.
Amanda
On 3/23/06 9:35 PM, "Stahlke, Herbert F.W." <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Bill,
>
> I've noticed this change together with a similar one among young
people,
> especially young women. In /mar?In/, the loss of the /t/ and the
insertion of
> the /I/ go hand in hand. In speakers who keep the /t/ it gets
released
> velicly, simply lowering the velum so that it become a nasal. Voicing
is
> roughly simultaneous with this. The glottal stop is, as you indicate,
a
> regular feature of syllable-final fortis stops (/p, t, k/). If the
alveolar
> closure is absent, there's no /t/ and now way of using velic release,
so when
> the glottis laxes to permit voicing a vowel occurs. As for a
transcription,
> I'd opt for something central, either a barred-i or a schwa, depending
on the
> speaker and on the final nasal.
>
> This similar pattern I mentioned, and maybe it isn't similar beyond
the
> speaker population that uses it, is the use of a full vowel rather
than a
> syllabic /n/ or /l/ in words with the suffixes -tion and -al. The
vowel that
> I've heard usually is the inverted <v>. I think I've heard it more
among
> Californians than elsewhere, but at an LSA a few years ago I heard an
> Australian speaker, a young man, use it. He'd been living in the Bay
area for
> about a year.
>
> Herb
>
> There is a pronunciation pattern common among some of my students that
> seems rather new to me; I'm bringing it up because I'm curious how
> widespread it is. It basically involves fully converting an unreleased
> /t/ to a glottal stop before a following vowel (using ? to stand for
> glottal stop):
>
> Martin /mar?tn/ --> /mar?In/
>
> Most speakers convert the "t" in "Martin" to a kind of glottal anyway,
> but it's one that's produced with the tip of the tongue in the
position
> where a "t" and an "n" are usually said. What some of my students are
> doing is skipping that tongue movement entirely, but adding a full (if
> lax) vowel before the "n". It's similar in some ways to the use of
> glottal stops in stereotypes of Cockney, but not exactly. And, of
> course, my students are Michiganders, not Londoners. Not even Canadian
> Londoners.
>
> Bill Spruiell
>
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*****
Amanda J. Godley, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
English Education
University of Pittsburgh
412-648-7313
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