Part of
Advances in SociophoneticsEdited by Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai
[Studies in Language Variation 15] 2014
► pp. 97–136
Edited by Chiara Celata and Silvia Calamai
[Studies in Language Variation 15] 2014
► pp. 97–136
Where and what is (t, d)?
A case study in taking a step back in order to advance sociophonetics
The variable deletion of /t,d/ in word-final clusters in English has garnered much attention from sociolinguists and, more recently, phonologists, most of whom model it as a binary variable phonological rule. This paper examines in detail some (t,d) clusters in York English and compares them with other word-final singleton and cluster consonants. In the light of the general literature on English, it explores an alternative view, that in at least one variety of British English “-t,d deletion” is in fact one of the common connected speech processes which apply at the boundaries between words. It thus underlines the importance for advances in sociophonetics of taking a step back to examine critically the basic units of analysis of variable rules.
References
Barry, Martin C.
1995 “A palatographic study of connected speech processes”.
Cambridge Papers in Phonetics and Experimental Linguistics
4: 1–16.
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo
2010a “Currently available data on English t/d-deletion fail to refute the classical modular feedforward architecture of phonology”.
18th Manchester Phonology Meeting
, Manchester 20th–22nd May 2010 [URL]
2010b “Morphologically conditioned phonetics? Not proven!”.
On Linguistic Interfaces (OnLI) II
, Belfast, University of Ulster 2nd December 2010 [URL]
Bermúdez-Otero, Ricardo & Graeme Trousdale
Bladon, R. Anthony, Caroline Henton & Brian Pickering
1984 “Towards and auditory theory of speaker normalization.”
Language and Communication
4: 59–69. 
Broadbent, Judith M.
1999 “A new approach to the representation of coronal segments.”
Issues in Phonology: Papers from an International Workshop
ed. by Stephen J. Hannahs & Mike Davenport, 1–25. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Browman, Catherine & Louis M. Goldstein
1990 “Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech”.
Papers in Laboratory Phonology I. Between the Grammar and Physics of Speech
ed. by John Kingston & Mary E. Beckman, 341–376. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buizza, Emanuela
2010 “Frication and affrication of /t/ in RP English”.
Language at the University of Essex (LangUE) 2010 Proceedings
ed. by Z. Absi, M. Althobaiti, V. Heyer, M. Ogawa, C. Patterson, & T. Soultatis, 16–28. [URL]
2011 “/t/ lenition in RP English spontaneous speech”.
8th UK Conference on Language Variation & Change
, Edge Hill 14th September 2011.
Bybee, Joan L.
2002 “Word frequency and the context of use in the lexical diffusion of phonetically conditioned sound change”.
Language Variation and Change
14: 261–290.
Coetzee, Andrees & Joe Pater
2011 “The place of variation in phonological theory”.
The Handbook of Phonological Theory
ed. by John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle & Alan Yu, 401–434. Oxford: Blackwell.
Crowdy, Steve
1995 “The BNC spoken corpus”.
Spoken English on Computer: Transcription, Mark-up and Applications
ed. by Greg Myers, Geoffrey N. Leech & Jenny Thomas, 224–235. Harlow: Longman.
Cruttenden, Alan
2008
Gimson’s Pronunciation of English
. London: Hodder.
Docherty, Gerard J.
1992
The Timing of Voicing in British English Obstruents
. Berlin: Foris Publications.
Docherty, Gerard J. & Paul Foulkes
2005 “Glottal variants of /t/ in the Tyneside Variety of English: an acoustic profiling study”.
A Figure of Speech
ed. by William J. Hardcastle & Janet Beck, 173–197. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Ellis, Lucy & William J. Hardcastle
2002 “Categorical and gradient properties of assimilation in alveolar to velar sequences: evidence from EPG and EMA data”.
Journal of Phonetics
30: 373–396.
Fabricius, Anne
2002 “Ongoing change in Modern RP: evidence for the disappearing stigma of t-glottaling”.
English World-Wide
23: 115–136.
Foulkes, Paul & Gerard J. Docherty
2005 “The social life of phonetics and phonology.”
Journal of Phonetics
34: 409–438.
Guy, Gregory
1991 “Explanation in variable phonology: an exponential model of morphological constraints”.
Language Variation and Change
3: 1–22.
Guy, Gregory & Charles Boberg
1997 “Inherent variability and the obligatory contour principle”.
Language Variation and Change
9: 149–164.
Guy, Gregory & Sally Boyd
1990 “The development of a morphological class”.
Language Variation and Change
2: 1–18.
Guy, Gregory, Jennifer Hay & Abby Walker
2008 “Phonological, lexical and frequency factors in coronal stop deletion in early New Zealand English”.
Laboratory Phonology 11 Conference
, Wellington 30th June – 2nd July 2008 [URL]
Hardcastle, William J.
1994 “Assimilation of alveolar nasals and stops in connected speech”.
Studies in General and English Phonetics in Honour of Professor J. C. O’Connor
ed. by Jack Windsor-Lewis, 49–67. London: Routledge.
Hayes, Bruce
1992 “Comments on Chapter 10”.
Papers in Laboratory Phonology II. Gesture, Segment, Prosody
ed. by Gerard J. Docherty & Robert Ladd, 280–286. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hazen, Kirk
2011 “Flying high above the social radar: coronal stop deletion in modern Appalachia”.
Language Variation and Change
23: 105–137.
Henderson, Jannette B. & Bruno H.
Repp 1981 “Is a stop consonant released when followed by another stop consonant?”.
Haskins Status Reports in Speech Research
67/68: 71–82.
Kiparsky, Paul
1985 “Some consequences of Lexical Phonology”.
Phonology Yearbook
2: 85–138.
Kühnert, Barbara & Phil Hoole
2004 “Speaker-specific kinematic properties of alveolar reductions in English and German”.
Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics
18. 559–575.
Lichtman, Karen
2010 “Testing Articulatory Phonology: variation in gestures for coda /t/”.
Illinois Language and Linguistic Society Conference 2 (ILLS2)
, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 29th May 2010.
Lodge, Ken R.
1984
Studies in the Phonology of Colloquial English
. London: Croom Helm.
Manuel, S. Y.
(1995) “Speakers nasalize /ð/ after /n/, but listeners still hear /ð/”.
Journal of Phonetics
23: 453–476.
Myers, James
1996 “The categorical and variable phonology of variable t-deletion in English”.
International Workshop on Language Variation and Linguistic Theory
, University of Nijmegen 10th September 1995 (revised version). [URL]
Nolan, Francis J.
1992 “The descriptive role of segments: evidence from assimilation”.
Papers in Laboratory Phonology II. Gesture, Segment, Prosody
ed. by Gerard J. Docherty & Robert Ladd, 261–279. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1996 “Overview of English Connected Speech Processes”.
Sound Patterns of Connected Speech. Description, Models and Explanation
ed. by Adrian P. Simpson & Matthias Pätzold, 15–26. Kiel, Institüt für Phonetik und digitale Sprachverarbeitung.
Roberts, Julie
1997 “Acquisition of variable rules: a study of (-t,d) deletion”.
Journal of Child Language
24. 351–372.
Robins, Robert H.
1970 “Aspects of prosodic analysis”.
Prosodic Analysis
ed. by Frank R. Palmer, 188–200. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sankoff, David, Sali Tagliamonte & Eric Smith
Santa Ana, Otto
1992 “Chicano English evidence for the exponential hypothesis: a variable rule pervades lexical phonology”.
Language Variation and Change
4. 275–288.
Schuppler, Barbara, Wim van Dommelen, Jacques Koreman & Mirjam Ernestus
2009 “Word-final [t] deletion: an analysis on the segmental and sub-segmental level”.
Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009)
, Brighton, 6–10 September 2009, 2275–2278.
Simpson, Adrain P.
1992 “Casual speech rules and what the phonology of connected speech might really be like”.
Linguistics
30. 535–548.
Smith, Jennifer, Mercedes Durham & Liane Fortune
(2009) “Universal and dialect-specific pathways of acquisition: caregivers, children and t/d deletion”.
Language Variation and Change
21. 69–95.
Solé, Maria-Josep
2007 “Controlled and mechanical properties in speech. A review of the literature”.
Experimental Approaches to Phonology
ed. by Maria-Josep Solé, M.-J., Patrice Speeter Beddor & Manjari Ohala, 302–321. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steriade, Donca
2000 “Paradigm uniformity and the phonetics-phonology boundary”.
Papers in Laboratory Phonology V. Acquisition and the Lexicon
ed. by Michael B. Broe & Janet Pierrehumbert, 313–334. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins & Fiona Tweedie
2007 “Talkin’ Jockney: Accent change in Glaswegian”.
Journal of Sociolinguistics
11. 221–61.
Tagliamonte, Sali A.
1998 “Was/were variation across the generations: View from the city of York”.
Language Variation and Change
Tagliamonte, Sali A. & Rosalind A. M. Temple
2005 “New perspectives on an ol’ variable: (t,d) in British English”.
Language Variation and Change
17. 281–302.
Temple, Rosalind A. M.
2000 “Now and then: the evolution of male-female differences in the voicing of consonants in two varieties of French”.
Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics
8. 193–204.
Ms. “Rethinking (t,d): a new ‘new look’ at a variable construc[t]”. [URL]
Trudgill, Peter
1974
The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tucker, Benjamin V. & Natasha Warner
2010 “What it means to be phonetic or phonological: the case of Rumanian nasals.”
Phonology
27. 289–324.
Wells, John C.
1982
Accents of English
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wolfram, Walt
1969
A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech
. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
1993 “Identifying and interpreting variables”.
American Dialect Research
ed. by Dennis Preston, 193–221. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Cited by
Cited by 7 other publications
Baranowski, Maciej & Danielle Turton
2020. td-deletion in British English: New evidence for the long-lost morphological effect. Language Variation and Change 32:1 ► pp. 1 ff. 
Cohn, Abigail C. & Margaret E. L. Renwick
2021. Embracing multidimensionality in phonological analysis. The Linguistic Review 38:1 ► pp. 101 ff.
Farrington, Charlie
2018. Incomplete neutralization in African American English: The case of final consonant voicing. Language Variation and Change 30:3 ► pp. 361 ff.
Forrest, Jon
2015. Community rules and speaker behavior: Individual adherence to group constraints on (ING). Language Variation and Change 27:3 ► pp. 377 ff.
MacKenzie, Laurel & Meredith Tamminga
2021. New and old puzzles in the morphological conditioning of coronal stop deletion. Language Variation and Change 33:2 ► pp. 217 ff.
Tanner, James, Morgan Sonderegger & Michael Wagner
2017. Production planning and coronal stop deletion in spontaneous speech. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 8:1
Villarreal, Dan, Lynn Clark, Jennifer Hay & Kevin Watson
2020. From categories to gradience: Auto-coding sociophonetic variation with random forests. Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology 11:1
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.