Short a and short o systems

ANAE describes the status of the caught-cot merger and the status of /æ/ as the two factors upon which “the dynamics of a North American vowel system” depend. Both of /æ/ and the relationship between /o/ and /oh/ are intimately tied up with the NCS, inasmuch as raising of /æ/ and fronting of /o/ away from /oh/ are the two changes that have been claimed to be the earliest stage of the NCS. For these reasons, examining the status of /æ/ and of the

caught-cot merger in eastern New York State is essential for determining the

dialectological status of the communities in the intermediate zone between the five established dialect regions, and in determining the phonological structure of the NCS in particular.

The status of /æ/ will be the starting point for the discussion in Chapter 4. The regions surrounding the area of interest in eastern New York show great variety in /æ/ systems in the Telsur data. While the Inland North, of course, is dominated by the general raising of /æ/ that is part of the NCS, in Western New England the majority of Telsur speakers show the sharp nasal allophonic pattern, in which /æ/ is raised, fronted, and tensed before nasal consonants but not substantially raised in other environments. In the nearby Canadian cities in the Telsur sample—Montréal, Ottawa, and Arnprior—there is substantially less raising of /æ/ even before nasals, and for a couple of speakers it is /g/, not nasals, that triggers the greatest amount of raising in a preceding /æ/. New York City, of course, is dominated by a phonemic split in /æ/, with the raised and tensed phoneme /æh/ occurring usually before voiced stops, voiceless fricatives,

and non-velar nasals; and Labov (2007) notes that a monophonemic pattern with superficial similarities to the New York City biphonemic pattern is found in Albany.

Studying the phonology of /æ/ is of great importance for determining the origin of the NCS in particular. Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner (1972) introduce the suggestion that the raising of /æ/ in the NCS represents not a mere phonetic change in the surface manifestation of the /æ/ phoneme but a structural change on a deeper level, from a short vowel phoneme /æ/ to an underlyingly long /æh/. ANAE carries this idea forward, and hypothesizes that this structural phonological change in /æ/ was brought about as the result of dialect contact among speakers with a variety of different /æ/ systems in western and central New York in the early 19th century, when migration into the region boomed as a result of the construction of the Erie Canal. The plausibility of this hypothesis can be tested by looking in more detail at the phonology of /æ/ in New York State, especially in the area where the Inland North’s general /æ/-raising comes into contact with the /æ/ systems of neighboring regions.

The low back or caught-cot merger was described at least as early as by Kurath (1939) in Eastern New England and Kurath & McDavid (1961) in Western Pennsylvania, and alluded to5

by Avis (1956) in Ontario. According to ANAE, the earliest nationwide study of the caught-cot merger was a telephone survey

conducted by William Labov in 1966, confirming the presence of the merger in

5 _{Avis writes, in a description of the vowel phonology of his own Ontarian speech, “/ɑ/ bot (also}

bought in my speech), /ɒ/ bog, /ɔ/ law (these last three vowels are probably not phonemically distinctive in my dialect)”. In other words, Avis alludes to the caught-cot merger as a probable feature of his own speech as a native of Ontario, but does not refer to it as a general feature of Ontario speech; his article is not concerned with the inventory of phonemic contrasts in Ontario in general, but rather with phonemic incidence in individual words.

Eastern New England and Western Pennsylvania as well as virtually all of the western United States. The earliest discussion of the merger in Northwestern New England appears to be that of Boberg (2001), although it was already quite advanced by that time; Boberg also notes the southward progress of the merger into western Massachusetts. Important and detailed studies of the spread of the merger to new communities include Herold (1990) and Johnson (2007); they both found merger taking place relatively suddenly (in apparent time) in communities undergoing intensive dialect contact.

The opposite of the caught-cot merger is the phonemic distinction between /o/ and /oh/, typically maintained in North America (by communities that maintain it) at least by means of having /o/ unrounded and /oh/ rounded. Labov (to appear: ch.7) observes that the unrounding of /o/ had been noted in New York State by 1832. ANAE describes certain regions as specifically

“resistant” to the merger, in that the phonetic difference between /o/ and /oh/ (the “margin of security”, in the sense of Martinet 1952) is greater than merely a difference in rounding: in the South, /oh/ has developed a back upglide; in the Inland North, /o/ is substantially fronted away from /oh/ as part of the NCS; and in a collection of Northeastern cities including New York City (and Albany, as noted by Labov 2007), /oh/ is raised and further backed. In other words, the region of eastern New York State selected for analysis in this dissertation is bordered by two regions where the merger is complete or nearly so (Canada and Northwestern New England), and at least two regions that are described as being actively resistant to the merger as a result of other sound changes (the Inland North, New York City, and Albany). This makes eastern New York State an ideal

location for studying the effect of dialect boundaries on the caught-cot merger and the ontological status of the “resistance” referred to in ANAE. This will be the focus of Chapter 5.