Raise, voice, and flap (tap)
Just in case you would have otherwise missed it: Mark Liberman wrote earlier today about flapping and related/interacting processes in English.
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This reminded me of something Mark observed during a phonology reading group meeting at Penn. It was sometime around 1995 and I was presenting Laura Benua’s “Identity Effects in Morphological Truncation”. Mark wondered whether we’d ever expect to find that a rule like flapping could overapply in truncated forms. More concretely: could there be a dialect of English in which the nickname Pete (from Peter [pʰi:ɾɚ]) is pronounced [pʰi:ɾ]? We all found it unlikely-seeming, and that it probably had something to do with the articulatory difficulty of tap implementation in non-intervocalic contexts.
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I wonder now, though, whether we might expect to find a variety of English in which the vowel of Pete is systematically different (qualitatively or quantitatively) from the vowel in, say, seat, even though both end in some sort of [t].
