English vowels

Remarks on vowels (and other vowel-like things)

Tense/lax in cooccurrence restrictions

Rogers tries to explain many cooccurrence restrictions in English as resulting from the tense/lax contrast. But his generalizations are subject to a great deal of dialect variation and there are a number of exceptions (e.g., "only lax vowels before [

]").

For example, there is no contrast between [i] and [] before [], or between [u] and [], or [e] and []. Rogers argues that it must be the tense vowel that occurs in this environment, assuming that all vowels before [] must have the same tenseness and that diphthongs are tense.

There is in fact a great deal of dialect variability in this. In my own speech, can only occur after lax vowels (or occur syllabically):

peer
pear
poor	or
pour
par
purr

(So my phonological system must treat [

] as a lax vowel.) [

] cannot occur after diphthongs, but must be syllabic in a second syllable:

pyre
power

Glides as non-syllabic vowels

The usual assumption is that all vowels are syllabic unless otherwise marked. The off-glides of diphthongs should be marked as non-syllabic, either using a consonant symbol or a non-syllabic diacritic. There can even be meaning contrasts in some dialects between syllabic and non-syllabic:

naive
knife

employ
employee

Clear and dark Ls

A "dark" L is a voiced, oral consonant made with two constriction gestures:

a alveolar lateral approximant [l]
a dorso-velar approximant []

We could symbolize by putting the "velarized" diacritc after [l], but it's a common enough sound to have a special symbol: [ l-tilde ].

Warning: Don't confuse this with the voiceless lateral fricative symbol, [].

The dark (velarized) L symbol has a simple ~ squiggle through it. You have to take your pen off the page in order to write it.
The voiceless lateral fricative symbol loops back and crosses itself. You can write it without taking your pen off the page.
Remember to try the calligraphy exercises in the back of Rogers.

Why would it make sense to use dark L after back vowels?

Canadian raising

In many dialects of Canadian English, the diphthongs of the noun house and the verb house are different.

house (verb)
house (noun)

A similar difference exists between eyes and ice:

eyes
ice

Before voiceless consonants, the starting point of the diphthongs is raised from [a] to [].

Why does it make sense for this raising to happen before voiceless consonants rather than before voiced?

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