Aaron J. Dinkin

Gradience, allophony, and chain shifts

The monophthongization of /ay/ in the Southern United States is disfavored by following voiceless consonants ( price ) relative to voiced or word-final environments ( prize ). If monophthongization is the trigger for the Southern Shift (Labov, 2010) and chain shifts operate as predicted by a modular feedforward phonological theory (cf. Bermudez-Otero, 2007), this implies price and prize must be two ends of a phonetic continuum, rather than two discrete allophones. We test this hypothesis via distributional analysis of offglide targets and statistical analysis of the effect of vowel duration. As predicted, we find price and prize share a continuous distribution in the Inland South, the region where the Southern Shift probably originated (Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006). We use Raleigh, North Carolina, outside the Inland South, as a comparison point; there, the same methodologies indicate price and prize are more discretely separated. Our results thus offer empirical support for the phonological theory that motivated the hypothesis.

Phonological Transfer as a Forerunner of Merger in Upstate New York

Herold (1990) discusses three mechanisms by which phonemic merger can take place: expansion, approximation, and transfer. A fourth possibility Herold touches on but does not explore might be called phonological transfer: as in (lexical) transfer, words move abruptly from one phonemic class to another; but rather than one lexeme at a time being transferred, all words of a particular phonological class move simultaneously. This paper provides evidence that phonological transfer is playing a role in the movement toward merger of /o/ (as in lot) and /oh/ (as in thought) in Upstate New York. Words containing (olF)—i.e., historical /o/ followed by /l/ plus a labiovelar, as in golf and revolve—are produced with /oh/ rather than /o/ in 74 percent of tokens; this use of /oh/ is increasing in apparent time. Many speakers using /oh/ in (olF) words have an otherwise clear phonemic distinction between /o/ and /oh/; however, the geographic distribution of this phonological transfer is correlated with other indices of progress toward the low back merger. This indicates that phonological transfer can be regarded here as an early sign of merger in progress, and that a single merger can proceed by two mechanisms simultaneously (here, approximation and phonological transfer).