costed

>>It just means that asking a non-linguist how they pronounce something is likely to be inaccurate, because they will say it how they think the "should", rather than what they normally use in speech.<<

And even if that is not the case, it is likely that the person being asked would use a higher-register form than otherwise, and that they likely would not have many phonological processes, especially elisions, assimilations, and like, which they would normally have in everyday speech.

<And even if that is not the case, it is likely that the person being asked would use a higher-register form than otherwise, and that they likely would not have many phonological processes, especially elisions, assimilations, and like, which they would normally have in everyday speech.>

And what would be the purpose of using "careful" speech? Is "careful" speech the correct way to speak?

<<And what would be the purpose of using "careful" speech? Is "careful" speech the correct way to speak?>>

No, it isn't more "correct" (correctness is a vague term, anyway). It's more formal. It's better to speak more carefully in certain situations whereas more casual speech is appropriate in others.

<It's better to speak more carefully in certain situations >

For example?

for example: a job interview

standard usage = formal
non-standard = informal

:) that's it

Not necessarily. For instance, even in formal speech here many details of pronunciation do not match the relevant standard here, General American. On the other hand, one can to a good extent speak of a "standard" colloquial North American English, whose features are widespread throughout colloquial speech in much of English-speaking North America, even if there are particular differences in pronunciation and vocabulary from place to place.

>>Similarly, I have never heard "caughten" used before in my life. You seem to have a lot of unorthodox usages in your speech, Travis, but, then again, I don't live in Wisconsin. I'd be interested to speak with other Wisconsin natives as to how pervasive this really is.<<

The main thing is that I do not exactly trust simply going up and asking people, as careful speech here is effectively just General American with a number of phonological differences; most of the more interesting stuff shows up in everyday speech here, while if asked most people will use careful speech instead. Furthermore, it seems that many people are highly unaware of the details of their everyday speech and will even deny many of such if asked (for instance, many here are unaware of that they very often say [ja:] rather than [jE{:] when they think they are saying "yeah"). Consequently, I prefer to just overhear how other people talk and listen in for particular features.

Also, my idiolect is rather progressive while the dialect here is in no fashion homogeneous; for example, I have the shift st > StS in words like "sister" and "yesterday", which many here lack, while I myself have heard A > Q / _r in the speech of some here, which I myself lack. Likewise, I often elide intervocalic /n/ and /nt/ before an unstressed vowel, just leaving the preceding vowel nasalized, which many here do not do either. In the opposite direction, many middle aged and older people here can have quite conservative speech, often lacking things like tr\ > tSr\ which are generally the rule with younger people here.

As for "caughten", it is not used consistently at all here, and if you asked someone, they probably would say "caught". Such forms, especially ones other than "boughten", generally primarily show up when a past participle is being used with another particle such as "out" or "up"; for instance, in informal speech I would most likely say "I have caught it" and "I have brought it" (while also sporadically using "I have caughten it" or "I have broughten it") but would normally say "I have caughten up with it" or "I have broughten it in?". I really do not know how widespread this feature is myself, even though it is definitely a natural dialect usage for at least myself (like the use of "by" to mean "at").

-(for instance, many here are unaware of that they very often say [ja:] rather than [jE{:] when they think they are saying "yeah")-

yeah /ja/ is normal in Canadian/Californian shift

>>yeah /ja/ is normal in Canadian/Californian shift<<

The thing is that this area has neither of those shifts, and the expected form for "yeah" would be something like [jE{:] here due to the NCVS. The presence of [ja:] in dialects in Wisconsin is actually due to it having been loaned from Germanic languages other than English.

<<For instance, it is very common in North American English dialects to make some irregular weak verbs even more irregular by eliding the weak suffix in their preterite forms, such as in the case of:

Gloss : Infinitive/Present : Preterite : Past Participle
"sell" : /sEl/ : /sol/ : /sold/
"told" : /tEl/ : /tol/ : /told/

In these cases, in Standard English the preterite and past participles are the same, and yet many dialects have made the two different in everyday speech.>>

That's interesting. I have the opposite case with the irregular verb "steal" in which the past tense for me is often "stoled" with an added weak suffix.

>>No, not really. /a/ is a checked vowel,<<

The matter is that /{/ and its analogues (such as /E{/ or /a/ in different dialects) is normally checked, and "yeah" is a weird word in that it ends in what is normally a checked vowel in NAE dialects. I myself wonder just how did "yeah" end up ending in /{/ (or an analogue of such) in NAE dialects to begin with... (Mind you that at least here there is also /nE{/, which I shall write as "neah", which likely arose out of analogy with "yeah" and other affirmative-negative pairs such as "yep"/"nope", "yah"/"nah", and so on.)

Of course, though, what is checked and what is free really depends on what dialect you are speaking of. For instance, /a/ here and in Scottish English is free (even though here at least it can only exist word-finally in monosyllables) whereas it is checked in northern English English dialects, and /Q/ in most NAE dialects with it is free whereas it is checked in English English dialects in general. The matter is that checkness versus freeness really does not depend on the particular vowel in question phonetically but rather on the lexical set(s) which a vowel belongs to in a given dialect.

Interestingly enough, around here "yeah" is [jæ], and can occasionally become [ja] as in: "Yeah, that's true" [ja Dats tr\u] or "yeah that's awesome" [Ca Dats OsVm].

"Nah" is [næ::]

Heh - there are distinct [na:] and [nE{:] here, which I write as "nah" and "neah" myself.