Realization

rich7   Saturday, March 19, 2005, 05:10 GMT

-Ed O'Neill [as Al Bundy]
(O'Neill, a native of Youngstown, Ohio)
has a quite strong COT-CAUGHT merger with the [a:] realization.
He says coffee [ka:fi], jaw [Ja:]...


"realization" here means....?
Travis   Saturday, March 19, 2005, 05:49 GMT
Well, it means how a particular phoneme or like (in this case the merged /A/ and /O/ phonemes) is actually rendered as a sound, in this given context...
rich7   Saturday, March 19, 2005, 07:02 GMT
I'm afraid I don't quite get it yet.
Travis   Saturday, March 19, 2005, 07:30 GMT
Okay, what this means is that when the phonemes /A/ (as on "cot" in North American English dialects which distinguish such from "caught") and /O/ (as in "caught" in North American English dialects which distinguish such from "cot") are merged together into a single phoneme in dialects which do not distinguish "cot" from "caught", the resulting sound that the two phonemes generally have when merged together as one phoneme is [A] (and probably would be considered the phoneme /A/). Note that the person above is probably using Tom's ASCIIbet, whereas I am using X-SAMPA, and [a:] in Tom's ASCIIbet is the same thing as [A] in X-SAMPA.
rich7   Saturday, March 19, 2005, 08:43 GMT
Very well explained now, mercy,,,...I'm such a pain in the back when it comes to x-sampa and stuff.