Rosalind Temple

New perspectives on an ol' variable: (t,d) in British English

A quantitative analysis of -t,-d deletion in contemporary British English reveals that preceding and following phonological contexts are significant, indicating that there is a universal constraint on -t,-d deletion consistent with universal phonetic and phonological properties of segments. However, in contrast to previous research, morphological class is not significant. Furthermore, our results do not support the hypothesis that -t,-d deletion is a variable rule that applies both lexically and postlexically. In sum, -t,-d deletion is a robust phenomenon in contemporary British English, but there are striking differences between British and North American varieties. Such differences suggest that -t,-d deletion is an ideal case study for further investigation of the phonology-phonetics interface, and adds to the available evidence from which an explanatory account of -t,-d deletion can be constructed. The first author acknowledges with gratitude the generous support of the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom (the ESRC) for research grant #R000238287, Grammatical Variation and Change in British English: Perspectives from York . We are also grateful to Ms. Heather A. Davies, who made it possible for us to work for a time in the same geographical location, as a result of which our original conception of the article was transformed. We would like to thank members of the phonetics/phonology research group at the University of York and our audiences at the following conferences for their comments and suggestions: VIEW 2000, University of Essex; NWAV 30, North Carolina State University, 2001; and the Biennial Meeting of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2002. Our anonymous reviewers deserve special mention as their insights prompted exacting revisions to our original manuscript. The result, we believe, is a stronger article; however, if points of contention remain, we welcome further discussion.

Probabilistic underspecification in nasal place assimilation

According to many works on English phonology, word-final alveolar consonants – and only alveolar consonants – assimilate to following word-initial consonants, e.g. ran quickly → ra [ŋ] quickly . Some phonologists explain the readiness of alveolar consonants to assimilate ( vs. the resistance of velar and labial articulations) by proposing that they have underspecified place of articulation (e.g. Avery & Rice 1989). Labial or dorsal nasals do not undergo assimilation because their place nodes are specified. There are reports that velar and labial consonants sometimes assimilate in English, but these are anecdotal observations, with no available audio and no statistics on their occurrence. We find evidence of assimilation of labial and velar nasals in the Audio British National Corpus, motivating a new, quantitative phonological framework: a statistical model of underspecification and variation which captures typical as well as less common but systematic patterns seen in non-coronal assimilation.

Old wine into new wineskins. A variationist investigation into patterns of voicing in plosives in the Atlas Linguistique de la France

In the following paper, data taken from the Atlas linguistique de la France(Gillie´ron and Edmont 1902–10) are subjected to quantitative analysis to investigate how the variable patterns of voicing in obstruents to be found therein is conditioned. The analyses show how the data (which are here restricted to underlyingly voiced stop consonants) are consistent to a remarkable degree with hypotheses formulated on the basis of the findings of modern experimental phonetic and sociolinguistic studies, which is suggestive not only for the wider study in question, but also in (re-)considering the potential of the Atlas as a valuable data source for comparisons to be made between the French spoken throughout France at the beginning and end of the twentieth century.

Temporal constraints and characterising syllable structuring

Introduction: temporal constraint and the syllable One of the most robust aspects of syntagmatic phonological patterning across languages is a strong tendency for consonants and vowels to collate with one another into structures of the size of a syllable. At the same time, an explicit and simple characterisation of the phonetics of syllables has yet to be found, leading many researchers to the conclusion that no such characterisation will ever be found. Syllabic patterning could be the result of a convergence of several different phonetic factors which each have their roots in different aspects of the speech communication process. In this paper, I will show evidence which indicates that one phonetic aspect of syllabic organisation is a tendency for gestures which inhabit particular locations in a syllable to have particular preferred intergestural timings. The evidence comes from a rate-controlled repetition experiment involving simple coda and onset structures. The syllable has various uses in linguistic theory, many of which are reviewed in Blevins (1995). First, it acts as a foundational unit in prosodic organisation. Thus, it figures in the construction of prosodic trees and in various operations in prosodic morphology. Also, minimal words often consist of a single syllable in many languages. Second, the syllable often serves as the domain within which segmental cooccurrence restrictions are expressed. A common traditional argument for the syllable is the existence of phonotactic constraints which are easily specified in terms of syllables or syllabic constituents.