many kinds of vowel lengths?

[bredmond812]

My problem: I want to find a systematic explanation of vowel length rules for American English

Discussion: Some sources i look at say that American English does not use vowel length. Some sources say that it does. in either case, the double dots are not used in phonetics for American English. This seems wrong, as I find places where if you want to really distinguish the sounds (as you would if you put the phonetic symbols in square brackets [] instead of forward slashes //.

For example, compare the following words office, officer, as well as apple, ask. Looking at the first pair, i feel that office has a vowel length of 1 segment, whereas officer has a length of 2 segments. the o in officer seems to have a longer sustain, to use music parlance. Looking at the second words,
apple has a vowel length of 1 segment, and ask has a vowel length of 2 segments or maybe even just 1 segment, but with additional feature. The a in ask starts high and drops low quite suddenly before it proceeds to the "s" sound. I havent been able to find a clear discussion of this, though in the first case it seems to be that the short vowels are used before fortis sounds, and the long vowels are used in all other cases.

Can anybody provide me some insight on the second case?

 

[Tawling]

Vowel length does not make a phonemic distinction in American English, meaning vowel length is not used to differentiate words or sounds. Vowel length is affected most commonly by intonation, stress, and talking speed, and there are slight variations based on surrounding phonemes. Unstressed vowels are often shorter, however it depends entirely on how strongly the speaker stresses other syllables in the word and the sentence. Depending on the sentence, some unstressed words may still have stressed syllables, but the vowel lengths between stressed and unstressed syllables may not change and stressing will entirely be conveyed through volume and pitch.

The difference between the vowel length in "ask" and "apple" is likely due to the fact that the consonant p immediately stops the airflow, whereas s does not, allowing the vocal cords to continue vibrating as you are forming the beginning of the sound. Both of these consonants are unvoiced, but only one produces a stop. As for "office" and "officer," there is no difference in vowel length when the words are spoken with the same intonation and stress.

As for fortis/lenis consonants, there may be a very small change in vowel length when preceding a fortis consonant depending on the speaker, but again it is quite variable and certainly not an aspect of the word's pronunciation to any notable degree.

In all of these cases, variation of vowel length does not make a word sound "wrong" to an English speaker provided that the lengths make sense given the intonation and stress you are using. Any word might very well end up with practically any distribution of vowel lengths depending on the context in which the word is spoken, and it will very rarely cause anyone to bat an eye unless it's highly exaggerated.

As a side note, there is a different notion of "vowel length" used when speaking about English colloquially. We refer to the /æ/ sound in "tap" as a short-a, and the /eɪ/ sound in "tale" as a long-a. These pairings exists for the other vowels as well. These vowel lengths are obviously unrelated to the linguistic definition of vowel length, but still interesting!

 

[Skrej]

One feature of English is that the vowel in any stressed syllable is held slightly longer than the vowels in unstressed syllables. That length is relative to each speaker, however.

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

. . . Looking at the first pair, I feel that office has a vowel length of 1 segment, whereas officer has a length of 2 segments. the o in officer seems to have a longer sustain, to use music parlance. Looking at the second words, apple has a vowel length of 1 segment, and ask has a vowel length of 2 segments . . . .

In the US, we don't have vowel "segments." Those As and Os all the same length. Officer is just office with the suffix er added.

Sometimes we stretch out vowels in conversation, for emphasis:

- That was a reeeeeeeally dumb joke!

- Oh, noooooo!

- This is a baaaaaad idea!

- Yaaaaaay! We won!