About the flapping of intervocalic /t/ in American English

"[...] the flapping of intervocalic /t/ in American English in generally said to be conditioned by adjacent segments and boundaries (cf. Kahn 1976), but the contrasting word-initial /t/'s of _by tomorrow_ (flapped) and _buy tomatoes_ (unflapped) reveal a contrast in prosodic foot structure (i.e., only foot-internal /t/ flaps) ― a level of prosody largely ignored in descriptive studies (including the many sociolinguistic attempts to document the details of change in progress)."

― Robert T. Harms

With every good wish,

Achab

That reminds of a question I've always wanted to ask:

How do Americans pronounce the "to" in "from time to time" and "we're all to blame" (i.e. after /m/ and /l/)?
I know it can be realized as simply [t_h@] but I often hear a voiced consonant instead. I'd say it's [(m.)n@] and [(5.)l@] but I'm not sure at all.

Let's see --

"from time to time" -- somewhere between a real T and a flapped T

"We're all to blame" -- either way, flapped or true. If I really emphasize "ALL", the "to" gets a real T: "We're ALL ta blame.". But if I don't, the T in "to" gets flapped -- "We're alda blame." (And yes, the O in "to" becomes a schwa in both."

We can do a true T on any *initial* T if we want -- just depends on how much of a hurry we're in. However, we are less likely to do it in the MIDDLE of a word that gets traditionally flapped, like little or cattle, unless we are really emphasizing the word. I've tried enunciating every single T in a sentence, and it's really weird for me -- your usual tongue position has to change, so it requires conscious thought and effort to say "lit-tel" instead of "liddle". And it messes with my normal rhythm and flow, so it's very unnatural to me.

All dictionaries use [t] with a dot and not [ɾ].
After all, to most foreigners, beautiful sounds more like beaudiful than
like beauriful. Let's ask the Scottish (who have the [ɾ] ~ [d] contrast) , does American/Australian pronunciation of beautiful sound more like beaudiful or like beauriful to your ears?

I'm not native and to me beautiful sounds like "beauriful" in American English.

I think it sounds like a r if your first language is Spanish. My first language is not Spanish and American t's have always sounded like a "d" to me.

it's like R in Spanish, but not all the R's, only in: caro, not carro.

Then it's true that beautiful sounds like "beauriful".

It doesn't sound that way to a native speaker, though.

A flapped T is actually the same sound as a flapped R -- pretty much like a D. The reason native English speakers are mystified by how the two could possibly be confused is because our real R is not flapped at all, and sounds completely different. So when we flap a T, we hear a D (although in our minds we're still thinking T). R's don't ever come to mind.