214 CHAPTER 5 [T, D]-DELETION in ENGLISH in English, a Coronal Stop
CHAPTER 5 [t, d]-DELETION IN ENGLISH In English, a coronal stop that appears as last member of a word-final consonant cluster is subject to variable deletion – i.e. a word such as west can be pronounced as either [wEst] or [wEs]. Over the past thirty five years, this phenomenon has been studied in more detail than probably any other variable phonological phenomenon. Final [t, d]-deletion has been studied in dialects as diverse as the following: African American English (AAE) in New York City (Labov et al., 1968), in Detroit (Wolfram, 1969), and in Washington (Fasold, 1972), Standard American English in New York and Philadelphia (Guy, 1980), Chicano English in Los Angeles (Santa Ana, 1991), Tejano English in San Antonio (Bayley, 1995), Jamaican English in Kingston (Patrick, 1991) and Trinidadian English (Kang, 1 1994), etc.TP PT Two aspects that stand out from all these studies are (i) that this process is strongly grammatically conditioned, and (ii) that the grammatical factors that condition this process are the same from dialect to dialect. Because of these two facts [t, d]-deletion is particularly suited to a grammatical analysis. In this chapter I provide an analysis for this phenomenon within the rank-ordering model of EVAL. The factors that influence the likelihood of application of [t, d]-deletion can be classified into three broad categories: the following context (is the [t, d] followed by a consonant, vowel or pause), the preceding context (the phonological features of the consonant preceding the [t, d]), the grammatical status of the [t, d] (is it part of the root or 1 TP PT This phenomenon has also been studied in Dutch – see Schouten (1982, 1984) and Hinskens (1992, 1996).
[Show full text]