Toe-ly gumby a sound change

On Sunday 9/10/2017, Steve Bannon was interviewed on 60 Minutes. Looking at the interview from the perspective of a phonetician, I was struck by pervasive evidence of a little-studied sound change in progress. Word-internal intervocalic coronal consonants — /t/, /d/, /n/ — in weak positions (i.e. not followed by a stressed vowel) are deleted, and the surrounding vowels are merged. This process is increasingly common in American English, and is frequently exemplified in Steve Bannon's speech, at least in this sample.

Let's look at a few examples. Early in the interview, Charlie Rose says "You are attacking on many fronts people who you need to help you, to get things done", and Bannon responds:

I've put in bold nine words where this process might apply. Let's take them one at a time.

(1) In the first example, "gonna" (which I'll assume is a lexicalized reduction of "going to") is pronounced as [ˈɡʌ.nə] — the intervocalic /n/ is a short (25 msec.) ballistic tap, but it's clearly there, and the syllable coalescence doesn't happen:

(2) The second example goes the other way — coalescence applies, and the sequence "gonna be" becomes just two phonetic syllables, [ˈgʌ̃.bi]. The /n/ leaves a nasalized vowel as its residue, and the second syllable of "gonna" is gone, with maybe some additional shading of the vowel following the [g]:

(3-4) The third and fourth examples are more striking, because some additional reductions some into play, and the whole sequence "president of the United States" comes out as something like [ˌprɛz.juˌnɑʲˈsteʲts]. To get this, we need not only to merge the second and third syllables of "president" and of "united" and reduce to nothing their final consonants, but also to elide "of the". Presumably for Mr. Bannon, "president of the United States" has become a low-entropy fixed expression, subject to extreme reductions like those that turn "Worcester" into [ˈwʊ.stɚ]:

(5) In the fifth example, coalescence applies, and "totally" become [ˈtoʷ.li]:

(6) In the sixth example, "president's" becomes something like [ˈprɛ.zɪ̃z]. This exemplifies not only coalescence of the second and third syllables, but also simplification of the final consonant cluster, which is partly due to loss of the nasal murmur and partly to the loss of the /t/ closure. Both of these last phenomena are also widespread and almost obligatory — for example, Americans rarely pronounce the /t/ in final /sts/ clusters (as in "artists").

I'll leave you to check the remaining three cases — "capitol", "everybody", and "city" — but my evaluation is that none of them show coalescence, so that the final score is five out of nine.

There's obviously more to be said. Are coalescences of this kind the end point of gradient phonetic reductions, or instances of an essentially quantal or symbolic "phonological rule", or new pronunciations entered in the mental lexicon as a result of either phonetic or phonological changes? Or maybe all three? For more discussion (than you probably want to read), see my paper "Towards Progress in Theories of Language Sound Structure", in a forthcoming festschrift for John Goldsmith.