Chapter 4. Where and what is (t,d)? 119
0
(a)a lad called (b) to be (a) good friendə l a tə β i: t : n tTime (s) 1.631d h^ d Figure 7. Spectrograms showing (a) called Wa y n e (59) (b) to be a good friend (60);
female speakers.
2.5 Place assimilation
Assimilation of place has become a central topic in discussions of the relationship
between phonetics and phonology in the wake of numerous studies examining gra-
dience versus categoricity, particularly with reference to residual gestures (e.g. Barry
1985; Nolan 1992; Ellis & Hardcastle 2002; Kühnert & Hoole 2004; Bermúdez-Otero
2010b). It is well known that in English, “word-final /t d n s z/ readily assimilate to
the place of the following word-initial consonant” (Cruttenden 2008: 301) but there
are no clear manifestations of this in the York (t,d) tokens. The very few examples
which might be interpreted this way are of glottalised tokens with preceding /n/
produced with a lengthened bilabial nasal assimilating to a following bilabial, as
exemplified in (63) and Figure 8.^26 As already noted, however, length is an unreliable
indicator of multiple underlying segments, although the qualitative change in the
creaky voice suggests there may be oral reflexes of both /n/ and /t/ here.
- This token was excluded from the statistical analyses reported in Tagliamonte & Temple
(2005) for reasons explained in that paper.