And the remarkable thing about men son's adaptation to the absence of intervocalic voicing/flapping in his OzEng interlocutors, in words like water, little, etc. was his huge overgeneralization. Some three months after starting daycare in Sydney, he abruptly began to devoice ALL medial obstruents in the appropriate metrical context. Hence, daddy>datty, doggie>dockie, baby buggy> bapy bucky, table > teipu (with his customary vocalization of syllabic /l/), bobbu (his consonant-harmonized and /l vocalized version of 'bottle')> boppu, and... taa da.. fricatives! Viz, his 'fuzzy bear', became, to our great amusement, his 'fussy bear', over>ofer, and when in this time period he learned (from me) the words 'driver' and 'driving', he duly pronounced them as 'driver' and 'driving'.

This hypergeneralization only lasted in its fullest form for about 8 weeks. Since neither his parents nor his Aussie peers and teachers provided any supporting evidence, he started to peel back the classes of sounds that underwent devoicing, and did so by natural classes. First to go back to voicelessness were the fricatives; next he resumed voiceless articulations of the stops one place of articulation at a time, beginning with velars (hence dockie, bucky go back to being doggie, buggy), followed by labials (teipu, bapy> teibu, baby). But the point of origin of the problem was trickier to figure out: he kept on saying daddy and body as datty and botty right up until we brought him back to the USA. I conjecture that this was a consequence of having no distinction in his underlying forms. In his earliest language acquisition (which occurred in Philadelphia) /t/ and /d/ were effectively merged in the flapping context. The only evidence for an underlying distinction is morphological alternations like bet-betting vs. bed-bedding, which presumably a 2 year old doesn't have much experience with. So since he had identical URs for words which in his OzEng target speech were sometimes voiced and sometimes voiceless, he had to learn them effectively word by word. He called me datty until about 3 months after we moved to Ithaca.

Greg

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Gregory R Guy <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Well, the Oz speakers whom I was friendly with in the 1980s, including the kids and teachers at my son's pre-school, uttered words like water, little, better, with voiceless stops in the middle, often with noticeable aspirated releases. So if flapping is a general characteristic today, there's been a change. Although I can't rule out the possibility that it's socially stratified: I worked at Sydney Uni with academics, and my son went to the Sydney Uni daycare with the children of academics. I note that our resident antipodean variationist, Miriam Meyerhoff, declares it to be variable.

Greg

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 1:50 PM, Aaron Dinkin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
On Thu, 9 Oct 2014, Gregory R Guy wrote:

During childhood and adolescence he put on Aussie characteristics (e.g vowels, non-flapping of intervocalic /t/)

Wait, Australia has non-flapping of intervocalic /t/?

-Aaron J. Dinkin
Dr. Whom

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--
Gregory R. Guy
Department of Linguistics
New York University

"It is only through an analysis of variation that the reality and meaning of a norm can be established at all." -Edward Sapir, 1938

--
Gregory R. Guy
Department of Linguistics
New York University

"It is only through an analysis of variation that the reality and meaning of a norm can be established at all." -Edward Sapir, 1938

The Variationist List - discussion of everything related to variationist sociolinguistics.

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