Chapter 4. Where and what is (t,d)? 121
(3) they cut my [ˈkʰʊʔ͡t ̚m ə] / [ˈkʰʊʔ͡p ̚m ə] trousers off me
0told by: l? b a:Time (s) 0.468 Figure 9. Spectrogram of told by (67); female speaker.
Moreover, fully glottal realisations of both (t,d) consonants and their preceding
stops might not only be masking a possible residual alveolar gesture, as noted in
§2.3, but also any assimilatory gesture which might be present, as in (68), from
the same sentence as (41).
(68) then it’ll have locked behind [lɒʔˑbɪɦɐɪn] me
The presence of assimilation in the York (t,d) data is much easier to determine when
it involves the preceding consonant, as predicted by Gimson/Cruttenden: “When
alveolar consonants are adjacent in clusters or sequences susceptible to assimilation,
all (or none) of them will undergo assimilation” (Cruttenden 2008: 302). However,
although this is certainly true of all the unassimilated examples presented in this
paper, the assimilation of preceding consonants has the consequence of rendering
the word-final consonant difficult to identify and there are no tokens in this data
set with assimilated penultimate and word-final consonants both unambiguously
present. Instead we find assimilating preceding consonants in cases of apparent dele-
tion, which may well be masking residual alveolar gestures, just as Browman and
Goldstein found for nabbed most [næbmoːst] and seven plus [sɛvm̩ plʌs] in their
study of X-ray microbeam data (Browman & Goldstein 1990: 365–367). This is per-
haps unsurprising, since there is evidence that alveolar nasals are more susceptible
to assimilation than stops (Hardcastle 1994) and most assimilated preceding conso-
nants in the York data are nasals, as illustrated in (69) and (70), although there are
also some assimilations involving preceding /s/, as in (71):