Pittsburg accent

Josh Lalonde   Fri Mar 16, 2007 7:46 pm GMT
I was bored in Economics class yesterday, so I started trying to analyze my professor's accent (he's from Pittsburg). I remeber thinking a few months ago that he was cot-caught merged, probably from hearing him use [A] for a THOUGHT word, but I'm not sure anymore. I think he might be NCVS'ed instead, because I noticed that he had a fairly front realisation of LOT/PALM and a raised TRAP. Does anyone know whether or not Pittsburg is cot-caught merged, and if it's not whether it is affected by the NCVS?
Lazar   Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:49 pm GMT
Ha ha! All through high school I have likewise sat through my classes analyzing my teachers' speech. By now it's just second nature to me to analyze people's accents when I hear them talk.

In answer to your question, I'm pretty sure that Pittsburgh (and Southeastern Pennsylvania in general) is cot-caught merged.

I'm not really sure about the distribution of the NCVS, but this Wikipedia map ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift.svg ) which was adapted from Labov's work shows the NCVS being absent from the Pittsburgh area and most of Pennsylvania. From what Travis has said, I think having the cot-caught merger tends to make dialects resitstant to the NCVS.
Lazar   Fri Mar 16, 2007 8:50 pm GMT
D'oh! I meant "Southwestern Pennsylvania".
Guest   Fri Mar 16, 2007 9:33 pm GMT
<<From what Travis has said, I think having the cot-caught merger tends to make dialects resitstant to the NCVS.>>

So if the NCVS and the cot-caught merging starting spreading in opposite directions and bumped into each other, what would happen?
Guest   Fri Mar 16, 2007 9:35 pm GMT
I meant to say "started" by "starting".
Travis   Fri Mar 16, 2007 11:07 pm GMT
>>From what Travis has said, I think having the cot-caught merger tends to make dialects resitstant to the NCVS.<<

Actually, what I said is the opposite, that having the NCVS makes dialects resistant to the cot-caught merger. There are definitely dialects which have been cot-caught merged historically but which have recently acquired the NCVS on top of it, specifically in Minnesota.
Travis   Sat Mar 17, 2007 12:06 am GMT
Just to elaborate, the reason why the NCVS may make dialects resistant to the NCVS is due to separating the previously vertically close /A/ and /O/ or /Q/ by separating them on different sides of the vowel space through shifting /A/ to [a] or even [{] in most positions (even though in some positions it may still be a back vowel such as [A] or [V]).
Travis   Sat Mar 17, 2007 2:30 am GMT
Of course, if the NCVS really made dialects resistant to the NCVS, it wouldn't exist to begin with.
Josh Lalonde   Sat Mar 17, 2007 3:46 am GMT
So there are accents that are c-c merged but NCVS'ed as well? Interesting. I was trying to listen yesterday for THOUGHT words to see if he distinguished them from LOT/PALM, but I didn't notice any. Then again, I was trying to study for the test in the second half of class, so my mind wasn't really on the topic.

<<By now it's just second nature to me to analyze people's accents when I hear them talk.>>

I find myself doing that too; like when someone's being interviewed on the news, I always try to figure out where they're from before they say it. It can actually be kind of annoying when I'm listening to music and I think "that was a THOUGHT word, and that was a FORCE word; did they rhyme? Interesting..." It takes away from the effect sometimes.
What a nerd I am.
Josh Lalonde   Sat Mar 17, 2007 4:28 am GMT
I noticed something else in his speech. His /kw/ was strongly aspirated in at least one instance [k_hw]. I wonder if this is a feature of Pittsburg accent or just part of his annoying style of ridiculously overemphasising everything (eg. not flapping /t/, drawing out vowels waaaaaaay to long, etc.)
Some other features of his accent:
/u/ fronted to [}@]
/o/ fronted to [@o]
/A/ fronted to [a_-]
/{/ raised to [E@]
That's all I can remember for now.
Gabriel   Sat Mar 17, 2007 4:31 am GMT
<<By now it's just second nature to me to analyze people's accents when I hear them talk.>>

I'd say that most regular contributors to this forum suffer from the aforementioned condition. If the subject matter of a lecture or seminar isn't compelling enough, I sometimes spend the time jotting down narrow transcriptions of particular words that seem interesting, unusual or diagnostic of a certain dialect.
Travis   Sat Mar 17, 2007 6:57 am GMT
>>Of course, if the NCVS really made dialects resistant to the NCVS, it wouldn't exist to begin with.<<

This is just a troll making a snide remark in response to what is obviously a mistype on my part.
Lazar   Sat Mar 17, 2007 7:39 am GMT
<<I sometimes spend the time jotting down narrow transcriptions of particular words that seem interesting, unusual or diagnostic of a certain dialect.>>

Yeah, I usually end up making phonetic transcriptions wherever I go and have spare paper.

One person whose accent really fascinates me is Sam Waterston. (I ended up hearing quite a lot of him during some "Law and Order" binges in the past.) In some ways his accent could be considered very conservative North American: he clearly preserves the "Mary-merry-marry" and "serious-Sirius" distinctions (which makes sense because I read that he was born and raised in Massachusetts and went to posh schools), he preserves the which-witch distinction, and he's fully rhotic.
But the weird thing is that he also seems to exhibit NCVS characteristics, like realizing /O/ as a very open [Q] or [A], realizing /A/ as a fronted [a], and realizing /{/ as something like [E{]. I'm not sure, but it also seems like he doesn't have the lot-cloth split - for example, I remember him talking about one defendant named "Moss", which he pronounced ["mas].
Travis   Sat Mar 17, 2007 7:42 am GMT
Such sounds as if the NCVS spread on top of a dialect much unlike a typical Upper Midwestern dialect, which makes it seem as if the NCVS is really widening its scope to the point that it is affecting dialects quite different from those in which it originated and initially spread.
Josh Lalonde   Sat Mar 17, 2007 11:58 am GMT
Yeah, I remember being interested in his accent when I used to watch Law & Order all the time. I thought his realisation of /{/ was due to over-applying ae-tensing, rather than NCVS. Does he have this feature when he's not playing Jack McCoy?