Advances in Sociophonetics

122 Rosalind A. M. Temple

(69) a a a sound box [saʊmbɔks] was only a diaphragm

(70) we built, um, Bradford combined court [kʰəmbaɪ̃ŋkʰɔːʔ] centre

(71) went to Ireland last year [laʃjiə] fishing

There are very few articulatory studies of assimilation in word-final clusters as

opposed to singleton consonants, so it is not clear whether assimilated CC# clus-

ters exist in quite so clear-cut a way as suggested by the hypothetical examples

provided by Cruttenden (e.g. “He w o n’ t /wəʊŋk/ come [...] He found /faʊmb/ both,

a kind /kaɪŋ/ gift”; Cruttenden 2008: 302). It would be possible to disambiguate

cases where the (t,d) and following consonant differ in voicing, from auditory/

acoustic data but it is difficult to see how to decide whether, for example, one or

two voiced bilabial consonants are present in found both, where this is not the

case. However, the very fact that Gimson/Cruttenden see no need to comment on

this difficulty suggests that this is a non-issue for them. Thus, although assimila-

tion creates analytical problems for categorical phonological analyses of (t,d), the

assimilated tokens again fit well into an integrated analysis of (t,d) as a CSP.

2.6 Coalescence

In the CSP literature, the term ‘coalescence’ is generally used to refer to the genera-

tion of, “a third ‘new’ segment (...) instead of two other abutting segments” (Nolan

1996: 22). As with assimilation, there are examples of coalescence of both (t,d)

consonants and their preceding consonants in the York data. All examples involve

following /j/, as does Nolan’s example ([əʊzjʊ] > [əʊʑə] in suppose you). (72) and

(73) illustrate /t#j/ sequences yielding [t͡ʃ] and (74), taken from the same stretch

of speech as (73), shows the preceding /s/ in shortest coalescing with following /j/

to yield a slightly lengthened [ʃˑ]. The latter two tokens are shown in Figure 10.

(74) would presumably count as an instance of deletion in a variable rule analy-

sis, whereas (73) would not, which seems to be imposing an artificial categorical

divide on what looks like a continuum of phonetic explicitness.

(72) like [the baby] kept you up [kʰɛp ̚ t͡ʃʲʊp ̚] 24 hours a night

(73) the (.) longest you [lɒŋɡɪst͡ʃ ɪ ̥] can wear is to there

(74) the shortest you [ʃɑ̰ːtʰɪʃˑɪ] can wear is to there

In (75) we observe a singleton word-final /z/ coalescing in the same way (but with

additional devoicing):

(75) ’cos you [kʰəʃə̥] can’t really do dances if you only get five turn up