User:Wugapodes/Lot-Thought merger draft

The cot–caught merger is a sound change present in some dialects of English where speakers do not distinguish the vowels in "cot" and "caught". Names like "cot-caught merger" and lot-thought merger come from the minimal pairs that are lost as a result of this sound change. The phonemes involved in the cot-caught merger are represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as and, respectively. These vowels are both low and back—as can be seen in the IPA chart—and is sometimes referred to as the low back merger. The father-bother merger that spread through North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has resulted in many dialects having no vowel difference in words like "bother", "lot", and "thought".

General features
The cot-caught merger is a sound change in English. It is common across North America, but also present in some dialects of English in the United Kingdom. The merger is typically unconditioned; unlike other sound changes like the pin-pen merger which only occur in certain contexts, the cot-caught merger occurs for all words in the language which contain these vowels. There are few minimal pairs for this phonological contrast due to the different origins and distributions of these vowel classes, and this low functional load may explain why the merger is so wide spread. The vowel class is descended from Old English /o/ with few changes to the class composition, while the  vowel class derives from the monopthongization of Middle English /au/. The Middle English /au/ vowel class descends from a number of Old English and Old French vowel classes, and this contributes to the skewed and restricted distribution of the contemporary vowel class.

In North America, the merger is thought to have occurred in most geographic regions. The Inland Canadian dialect covers most of Canada, with the exception of the maritime provinces, and is partly characterized by a merger of the low back vowels. In the United States, it distinguishes the western dialect region from other regional varieties such as the Inland North dialect and Southern English, and it is present in some varieties of New England English.

The presence or absence of the cot-caught tends to correlate with other sound changes, and its relationship to the rest of the vowel system has been studied in order to understand what causes and is caused by the merger. Should discuss the father-bother merger relationship here, including roeder and Gardner 2013 In the Canadian Vowel Shift and the California Vowel Shift, the cot-caught merger is accompanied by a change in the front lax vowels. The Low Back Merger Shift hypothesis proposes that this change in the front lax vowels is caused by the cot-caught merger.

To edit later
The shift causes the vowel sound in words like cot, nod and stock and the vowel sound in words like caught, gnawed and stalk to merge into a single phoneme; therefore the pairs cot and caught, stock and stalk, nod and gnawed become perfect homophones, and shock and talk, for example, become perfect rhymes. The cot–caught merger is completed in the following dialects:


 * Some dialects within the British Isles:
 * All Scottish English accents, towards (without the father–bother merger)
 * Irish English broad and traditional accents, including:
 * Some northern Ulster English including in conservative mid Ulster English towards and in Ulster Scots English towards  (without the father–bother merger)
 * Many North American English accents:
 * Several accents of U.S. English, including:
 * Pittsburgh English, towards (with the father–bother merger)
 * All New England English towards (in Boston and Eastern New England, particularly towards ), except in Rhode Island and southern Connecticut
 * All Western American English (with the father–bother merger)
 * Cajun English towards.
 * Nearly all Canadian English, including:
 * Standard Canadian English towards (with the father–bother merger)
 * Maritimer and Newfoundland English, towards (with the father–bother merger)
 * Some Singaporean English (without the father–bother merger)

North American English


Nowhere is the shift more complex than in North American English. The presence of the merger and its absence are both found in many different regions of the North American continent, where it has been studied in greatest depth, and in both urban and rural environments. The symbols traditionally used to transcribe the vowels in the words cot and caught as spoken in American English are ⟨ɑ⟩ and ⟨ɔ⟩, respectively, although their precise phonetic values may vary, as does the phonetic value of the merged vowel in the regions where the merger occurs.

Even without taking into account the mobility of the American population, the distribution of the merger is still complex; there are pockets of speakers with the merger in areas that lack it, and vice versa. There are areas where the merger has only partially occurred, or is in a state of transition. For example, based on research directed by William Labov (using telephone surveys) in the 1990s, younger speakers in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas exhibited the merger while speakers older than 40 typically did not. The 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey, in which subjects did not necessarily grow up in the place they identified as the source of their dialect features, indicates that there are speakers of both merging and contrast-preserving accents throughout the country, though the basic isoglosses are almost identical to those revealed by Labov's 1996 telephone survey. Both surveys indicate that, as of the 1990s, approximately 60% of American English speakers preserved the contrast, while approximately 40% merged the phonemes. Further complicating matters are speakers who merge the phonemes in some contexts but not others, or merge them when the words are spoken unstressed or casually but not when they're stressed.

Speakers with the merger in northeastern New England still maintain a phonemic distinction between a fronted and unrounded (phonetically ) and a back and usually rounded  (phonetically ), because in northeastern New England (unlike in Canada and the Western United States), the cot–caught merger occurred without the father–bother merger. Thus, although northeastern New Englanders pronounce both cot and caught as, they pronounce cart as.

Labov et al. also reveal that, for about 15% of respondents, a specific – merger before but not before  (or other consonants) is in effect, so that Don and dawn are homophonous, but cot and caught are not. In this case, a distinct vowel shift (which overlaps with the cot–caught merger for all speakers who have indeed completed the cot–caught merger) is taking place, identified as the Don–dawn merger.

Resistance
According to Labov, Ash, and Boberg, the merger in North America is most strongly resisted in three regions:
 * The "South", somewhat excluding Texas and Florida
 * The "Inland North", encompassing the eastern and central Great Lakes region (on the U.S. side of the border)
 * The "Northeast Corridor" along the Atlantic coast, ranging from Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York City to Providence (but not to Boston or anywhere north of there).

In these areas, sociolinguists have studied three techniques that speakers use to preserve the contrast. The first was fronting of found in the Inland North. In this technique, speakers advance the vowel  as far as the cardinal  (the open front unrounded vowel). This is also met with the raising of the vowel  to  in all instances. (Which vowel triggered which other vowel is still debated.)

The second technique of resistance to the merger is the raising of the vowel  found in the New York City and the mid-Atlantic region's accents. In areas that don't use this technique, sometimes is pronounced closer to. On the contrary, in this technique, either retains its historical high (raised) value, or it is raised even higher to , or (in the extreme case) even.

The third technique is found in the South. This is the result of vowel breaking in Southern American English, where is broken to, keeping it distinct from the  vowel. Many Southerners, however, are beginning to embrace the merger, particularly Southerners who are younger or urban.

African-American Vernacular English accents have traditionally resisted the cot-caught merger, with  pronounced  and  traditionally pronounced, though now often. Early 2000s research has shown that this resistance may continue to be reinforced by the fronting of, linked through a chain shift of vowels to the raising of the , , and perhaps  vowels. This chain shift is called the "African American Shift". However there is evidence of AAVE speakers picking up the cot-caught merger in Pittsburgh and Charleston, South Carolina.

Origin
Theories of the origin of the merger exist, with two competing scenarios. One group of scholars argues for an independent North American development, while others argue for contact-induced language change via Scottish immigrants (e.g. Dollinger 2010), in which a role is afforded to Canadian English, where the spread from East to West was completed more quickly than in the US. Others consider the issue unresolved (Boberg 2010: 199?).

England
In London's Cockney accent, a cot–caught merger is possible only in rapid speech. The vowel has two phonemically distinct variants: closer  (phonetically ) and more open  (phonetically ). The more open variant is sometimes neutralized in rapid speech with the vowel  (phonetically ) in utterances such as  (phonemically ) for I was four then. Otherwise is still readily distinguished from  by length.

Scotland
Outside North America, another dialect featuring the merger is Scottish English. Like in New England English, the cot–caught merger occurred without the father–bother merger. Therefore, speakers still retain the distinction between and.