On Thu, 9 Oct 2014, Miriam Meyerhoff wrote:
> As does US English. Stephanie Strassel?s work on this variable in the
> 1990s using the LDC corpora as her dataset showed very nicely that even
> ?Mericans seldom if ever flap words like ?veto?
Fascinating! What words count, though, as "like 'veto'"? (My gut feeling
is that variability of flapping in the word "veto" itself is less due to
variability of flapping per se and more likely to be due to variability in
whether or not the "-o" in "veto" bears secondary stress, and thus whether
it constitutes an environment for flapping at all.)
> I sat through a formal lecture of Angela Davis' in 1998 (so no, she was
> not speaking AAVE) and she flapped:
> write up
> better
> get out
> commit a crime
> educated
>
> and did not flap:
> society
> proximity
> ethnicity
> paid a pittance
> executed
The only one of these I'm *really* surprised by is "executed". I'm only
*somewhat* surprised by "society", "proximity", and "ethnicity", since in
those at least the syllable that follows /t/ is a possible bearer of
secondary stress; as for "pittance", for me at least, following syllabic
/n/ isn't a possible environment for flapping.
-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom
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