Kim Cattrall's alveolar plosives

Caity Weaver, "Kim Cattrall Can Talk to Me About Anything", NYT 6/6/2018:

Because I’m one of the youngest people alive (29), I was not old enough to be interested in a program with “sex” in the title when “Sex and the City” premiered on HBO in 1998, 20 years ago today.

Consequently, beyond the broadest outlines of the plot — there are four friends, having sex, and the city — the only detail I know firmly about the show is: Sa-MANh-thAH TAL-hkss hLike thIS.

If you have ever seen even one second of the actress Kim Cattrall in character as Samantha Jones, the vamp of “Sex and the City,” you know what I mean. From Ms. Cattrall’s larynx, the words of Samantha slunk and shimmied across the Manhattan of the early aughts, her voice sliding around ribald puns as if extra lubricated. […]

What you might not know is that Kim Cattrall’s real voice is as unlike the voice of Samantha Jones as a late October morning is unlike a Fourth of July high noon. I know this. I know this in my bones. I know this so well the knowing will be imprinted in the DNA of my descendants for a hundred generations — because I am unable to stop listening to the same four podcast episodes featuring Ms. Cattrall, over and over.

They’re very relaxing. […]

When Ms. Cattrall says the word “didn’t,” she respects each and every D and T.

Indeed, it could be said that alveolar plosives — the consonant sounds made by tapping the tip of the tongue to the alveolar ridge, just behind the teeth, as when hitting one’s D’s and T’s — are some of Ms. Cattrall’s best work. She is a careful enunciator who takes time to pronounce distinctly every element of a consonant cluster. Her diction might be described as intricate.

Most native speakers of North American English don’t distinctly pronounce their alveolar plosives (in other words: stops) when they occur at the end of a word. Take, for example, this very sentence, which starts with the word “take” and ends with the word “it.” For many Americans and Canadians, the T of “it” sounds semi-swallowed. Linguists debate whether this muted effect is the result of a failure to release a final, teensy puff of air, or of something happening way down inside the throat, in the space between the vocal cords called the glottis. The point is, the sound is different — smaller sounding — than the T in “take.” Not so for Ms. Cattrall or, as Ms. Cattrall might say, noT so for Ms. Cattrall.

Let me stipulate, as the lawyers say, that Kim Cattrall's voicing of Samantha Jones is indeed different from the voice she displays in recent interviews, and that she has excellent diction in both roles. And it's terrific to see alveolar plosives and phonetic variation discussed in the mass media.

Also, I haven't listened to all of the four podcasts that Ms. Weaver links to. But I was puzzled about the claim that Ms. Cattrall "respects each and every D and T" in didn't. That would be an odd way for any native speaker of North American English to talk, at least if "respect" means "full stop closure and release", as it seems to in this context. And I'd expect listeners to find that pronunciation affected if not downright bizarre, rather than relaxing.

So I downloaded and scanned the first linked podcast — "'Kim Cattrall with Isabelle Huppert' on Talkhouse" — and confirmed my expectation that Kim Cattrall pronounces didn't pretty much like any other careful speaker of North American English. That is, she generally doesn't go all the way to monosyllabic [dɪnʔ] or [dɪn], but she does seriously reduces the /d/ and /t/ in the second syllable. Here's the first couple of examples from that podcast:

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As I observed a few weeks ago in "On beyond the (International Phonetic) Alphabet", we don't have — but also don't need — good ways to characterize such reduction in symbolic terms. Here's her first didn't, with a waveform and spectrogram in which pronunciation of the word-initial /d/ is marked with a red arrow, the word-medial /d/ with a blue arrow, and the word-final /t/ (if it exists at all) with a green arrow:

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Here's the same treatment for her second didn't from that clip:

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Note also that "want to" becomes [wɐɾ̃ə], with a medial nasal flap and no residue of the two t's — what's commonly written "wanna" — just as we would expect for any speaker of most varieties of North American English.

And at the start of her second phrase, I believe that she's managed to reduce the but in "but I" to a voice labiodental onset, which again is a normal thing.

I could go on to present the first few unreleased word-final /t/ and /d/ sounds in that same interview, but you get the idea. As I said, I'm really happy to see phonetic terminology and discussion of phonetic variation in the popular press, and I'm sure that there's something about Kim Cattrall's speech that Caity Weaver is responding to. But if the attraction is what she describes, it must be happening in parts of the podcasts that I haven't heard yet.