newly minimal proof of everyday grammatical know-how

A few years back I started noticing some educated southern British English speakers were fronting the vowel in 'good'. I think that perhaps this may be part of the same trend that has now given rise to what in my speech are homophones becoming divergently pronounced according to the perception of the speaker as to grammatical analysis: see here...

in southeastern England /uː/ has developed two very distinct allophones: a truly back [uː] before tautosyllabic (or stem-final) /l/, but a fronted quality approaching [yː] in other positions. The kingly ruler, ˈruːlə, is taken as transparently bimorphemic, rule#(e)r, so retains the back uː of rule; but the measuring ruler, ˈryːlə, has lost touch with its origins and is taken as an unanalysable unit, with a corresponding clear l and fronted vowel yː.

And, incidently, this is a riposte to those who reckon that 'certain people' have no grammar. Admittedly this is not knowingly done according to a morphological distinction, yet it shows very neatly that native speakers have, somewhere in their heads, a very sophisticated sense of grammar which can inform the operation of new forms of language.

John Wells’s phonetic blog: newly minimal: