A foot-based approach to English /t/-lenition
Lee, Minkyung (Daegu University, Professor)
Abstract
Alveolar plosives among English stop consonants undergo weakening processes
when they are surrounded by two heterosyllabified peaks, i.e. intervocalically. As
well-defined and observed, intervocalic alveolar stops in English tend to be
neutralized by losing their voicing contrast, and thus they become homophones,
which is transcribed as [D] (or [ɾ] in IPA). Such flapped sounds in the context of
V.CV are commonplace when Cs occur before an unstressed vowel whether or not
the first vowel gets stressed. In addition, especially the voiceless target /t/ shows
different behavior. It turns into a flap before a syllabic liquid but it is glottalized
before a syllabic nasal, instead. Given a foot-based prosodic approach under the
parallelist optimality theoretic enterprise, /t/-flapping found in word-medial position
(as well as its voiced counterpart) is entirely foot-internal without resorting to a
purely syllable-based ambisyllabification. The hierarchically-arranged intervocalic
markedness constraints favor a vowel-like segment the most, i.e. a sonorant such as a
flap in this specific context. Of particular interest is that the target /t/ sometimes
undergoes glottalization according to the manner of the syllabic trigger. /t/-flapping
is switched on before a syllabic liquid but /t/-glottalization is on before a coronal
syllabic nasal. For the former, Agree[Manner] guarantees /t/-flapping in which the
target /t/ adjusts its manner to a syllabic liquid. For the latter, however, OCP[Place]
enforces /t/-glottalization as the second best strategy when /t/-flapping is entirely
blocked. Provided that OCP[Place] is satisfied, /t/-flapping under Agree[Voice] is
still the best option even before a labial syllabic nasal.
Keywords
alveolar plosives, /t/-flapping, /t/-glottalization, weakening process, parallelist OT