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dr_whomIn the song "Paula: an Improvised Love Song" from the musical The Goodbye Girl (lyrics by David Zippel), as performed on the original cast album by Martin Short, Short does a variety of accents, impressions, and funny voices.
When he's doing a Cary Grant impression, the lyrics imply the caught-cot merger, rhyming Paula with dollar and collar. I'd bet money that Cary Grant didn't have the caught-cot merger, so there's some interesting dialect contact phonology going on in Zippel's decision that he could get away with these rhymes in a Cary Grant voice specifically. (Elsewhere in the song he uses a French accent to rhyme Paula with Angola.)
(I doubt Zippel himself has the caught-cot merger. He's from a part of eastern Pennsylvania where Herold (1997) reported no evidence of merger, and in the song, cot-caught merging rhymes appear exclusively in the Cary Grant section; elsewhere, Paula is rhymed with taller, crawl a-, enthrall her, and scrawl a-. Martin Short is from Ontario, and so presumably does have the merger.)
My guess it that what's going on is that Cary Grant had a rounded cot vowel, and Zippel has an unrounded cot vowel. So Zippel perceives Grant's cot vowel as merged with his own (i.e., Zippel's) caught vowel, not noticing that it's distinct from Grant's caught vowel.
When he's doing a Cary Grant impression, the lyrics imply the caught-cot merger, rhyming Paula with dollar and collar. I'd bet money that Cary Grant didn't have the caught-cot merger, so there's some interesting dialect contact phonology going on in Zippel's decision that he could get away with these rhymes in a Cary Grant voice specifically. (Elsewhere in the song he uses a French accent to rhyme Paula with Angola.)
(I doubt Zippel himself has the caught-cot merger. He's from a part of eastern Pennsylvania where Herold (1997) reported no evidence of merger, and in the song, cot-caught merging rhymes appear exclusively in the Cary Grant section; elsewhere, Paula is rhymed with taller, crawl a-, enthrall her, and scrawl a-. Martin Short is from Ontario, and so presumably does have the merger.)
My guess it that what's going on is that Cary Grant had a rounded cot vowel, and Zippel has an unrounded cot vowel. So Zippel perceives Grant's cot vowel as merged with his own (i.e., Zippel's) caught vowel, not noticing that it's distinct from Grant's caught vowel.
