English Vowels:
Their Surface Phonology
and Phonetic Implementation
in Vernacular Dialects

by
Thomas Clark Veatch

Detailed Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Acoustics. The Mapping from Articulation to Formant Structure
  • Fundamental Facts About the Relation of Formants to Articulation
  • Boundary Conditions for Standing Waves in the Vocal Tract
  • F1:F2:F3=1:3:5 in Uniform Tube & on Average in the Vocal Tract
    • Rayleigh's Rule
    • Explaining the Node-Antinode Rule.
  • Rayleigh's Rule Applied to the Mapping from Articulation to Acoustics
  • Acoustic Rhoticity
  • Transitions to Consonants
  • Coronal Loci
  • Implications for Phonetic and Phonological Theory
  
  
• Phonological Preliminaries: The Vowel Structure of Reference American
  • ``General American English''
  • English Lexical Sets
  • Temporal Vowel Structure in English
    • Degrees of Phonological Vowel Length
    • Length and Complexity in Structuralist Treatments of English Vowels
    • Is /r/ a Glide?
      • Trager & Bloch
      • Yes, /r/ Is a Glide.
    • The Vowel Within Syllable Structure
    • Syllable Weight
    • Implications of the Glide Slot for Dialectal Variation and Historical Change.
  • Static Vowel Structure
    • The Neutral Position
    • Vowel Height as Multi-Dimensional.
    • Vowel Height as a Single, Numbered Dimension
    • Privative Height Features
  • Reference American Vowel Structure
    • Apparent Problems in the Base-6 System
    • Features in Reference American
  • Phonetic Implementation of Reference American
  • Summary
  
  
• Theoretical Background Issues
  • Linguistic Versus General Phonetics
    • Types of Phonetic Facts
    • The Overlap of Phonetics and Linguistics
  • The Vernacular
  • Issues in Acoustic Phonetic Research
    • Definitions
    • Acoustic Phonetic Features
  • Phonetic Inference from Differences in Formant Frequencies Among Classes of Vowels
    • Mismatch between Audible Differences and F1-F2 Differences.
  • Lisker (1949) Replicated
  • Vowel Reduction
    • Types of Vowel Reduction
    • Phonetic Vowel Reduction
  
  
• Methods
  • Phonological Methods
  • Data
  • Analysis Procedures
    • Background
    • A Twelve-Step Program for Acoustic Analysis
  • Impressionistic Coding for Phrasal Stress
  • Clitics Versus Other Words
  • Locating Acoustic Nuclei
  • Exclusions, Deletions, Total Measurements.
  • Outlier Analysis
  • Statistical Analysis
    • The Bootstrap
    • Are the Means of Two Samples in 2-Space Significantly Different?
  
  
• Jamaican Creole
  • Speaker Information
  • Surface Phonological Structure
  • The Shape of Formant Space
  • Impressions of Stressed Vowels
  • Acoustic Correlates of Phonological Vowel Length
    • Duration Differences.
    • Phonological Length and Vowel Quality
  • Mean Vowel Nuclei in JC
    • Peripherality
    • An Acoustic-Phonetic Grammar for JC Nuclei
  • Stress Effects
  • Summary
  
  
• Chicago White English
  • Characteristics of Speakers and Recordings
  • Surface Phonological Inventory of the Vowel System
  • Impressions of Stressed Vowels: The Northern Cities Chain Shift
  • The Shape of Vowel Space
  • Overlap of Phonemes
  • Bootstrapped Mean Distributions and Sound Change
    • Evidence for the Northern Cities Chain Shift
    • Short Vowel Lowering and Centralization
      • Phonetic Grammar Specifies Different Nuclei for /-/ Vowels.
      • Further Observations
  • Stress Reduction
    • Kinds of Reduction
    • Do Stressed Vowels Attain a Target?
  • Summary
  
  
• Alabama English
  • Characteristics of the Speaker
  • The Surface Phonology of Vowels
    • The Vr subsystem
  • The Shape of Vowel Space
  • Impressionistic Transcriptions of the Stressed Vowels
  • Instrumental Evidence for Sound Change
    • Nucleus-Glide Differentiation
  • Stress and Vowel Quality
  • Summary
  
  
• Los Angeles Chicano English
  • The Community, the Individual
  • LACE Vowel Structure
  • Impressionistic Transcriptions
  • Overlap of Phonemes
  • The Shape of Vowel Space
  • Mean nuclei in F1-F2 space
  • Stress Reduction
    • One Vowel at a Time
    • All Vowels at Once.
  • The Low-Back Merger
  • Summary
  
  
• Conclusion: Consonant Effects, and Phonetic Grammar
  • Consonant Effects
    • Effect of following /l/
    • Alabama Lowering Before /ng/.
  • Phonetic Grammar
  
  
• Features of Time and Space in Linguistic Structure
  • Time
  • Space
  • Linguistic Time
  • Linguistic Space and the Well-Formedness Conditions
    • Proof of Well-Formedness Condition clauses
  
  
• Historical Issues in Jamaican Creole
  • Sound shifts in Caribbean Creoles
    • Push chains
  • Decreolization and Merger
    • Unmerger is impossible
      • False Unmerger
      • Near-Merger
      • The Possibility of Unmerger
    • Unmerger and Decreolization
  
  
• Average Duration Measurements
• Bibliography
• About this document ...