Four low-level pronunciation rules of Northern States English

Abstract

Before presenting the facts and discussions with which this writing is concerned, it may be helpful to clarify a few concepts, items of terminology, and transcriptional practices with which some readers may not be familiar. Much of my point of view depends on a prejudice that seems obvious to me, but is probably not shared by every reader: The difference between a phonological transcription (which employs underlying segments, partially altered, and accents written over syllabic peaks) and a phonetic transcription in square brackets (which employs symbols for actual sounds and uses ticks to indicate stress onsets—which vary in English with the tempo) is that the latter is as close to the sounds spoken and heard as possible. Although phonological analyses may and do eliminate redundancies (including complementarities), this seems to me inappropriate for transcriptions claiming to be phonetic—those that result from the output of the latest-ordered sound rules. Admittedly, one has to abstract somewhat (every utterance of a sound is slightly different), but I do not think we ought to abstract redundancies from phonetic transcriptions beyond those that are more or less inevitable and universal—the different forms of [k] in [ɑka, uku, ukɑ, ɑku] or the devoicing of sonorant consonants after tautosyllabic fricatives. A few compromises have to be made for the sake of practical utility, but I would say that they should be no more redundancy-free than is minimally necessary, and that they should represent the output of the latest low-level rule. Otherwise, they are, to some degree, phonological, not phonetic transcriptions.