Advances in Sociophonetics

114 Rosalind A. M. Temple

co-occur with /t,d/ deletion, as in (42). told here is unstressed and spoken very

fast; as well as deletion of preceding /l/, the following vowel is reduced and the

/t/ of the following preposition is also lenited. The stressed /ld/ cluster of hold, by

contrast, has both preceding [l] and released [d]. Here the cumulative evidence

suggests that the deletion of /d/ is simply one of a set of cooccurring CSPs, which

are a function of speech rate and accentual patterns.^20

(42) and they said (.) told me to [tʰɒmɪdə] hold it

0

told me to

ə m d ə

0.1679

Time (s)

h

Figure 5. Spectrogram showing told me to (42); male speaker.

Viewed through the lens of lenition, then, the behaviour of (t,d) preconsonantally

shows a range of decreasing phonetic explicitness paralleled in other word-final

singleton and cluster consonants, and explicable in terms of lenition partly as a

function of the surrounding phonetic context. In British English, at least, (t,d)

lenition shows no distinctive sociolinguistic patterning and it is seen to co-occur

with varying levels of phonetic explicitness in surrounding segments. We now

turn to examining the interactions, as opposed to simple co-occurrence patterns,

of (t,d) lenition with other well known CSPs.

20. Cf. Nolan again: “Segmental CSPs are not independent of prosodic CSPs – they are sensitive
    to the prosodic restructuring which the latter bring about, and ultimately may turn out to be
    treated best in conjunction with the prosodic changes” (Nolan 1992: 18).