Chapter 4. Where and what is (t,d)? 105
(12) he’d left [lɛftə̰] (.) Betty with nothing
(13) and he found Minesweeper [faʊnd̥] (.) [maːɪnswiːpʰə], have you played
Minesweeper?
But there are also clear cases where no pause is involved, as in (14) and (15):
(14) like my hands would have been fucked basically [fʊʔtbe ̰sɪklɪ]
(15) in an underground bunker [ʊndəɡɹaʊndbʊnkʰə̰]
(16) and (17) show unreleased /t/ and /d/ respectively:
(16) your needles left particles [lɛft ̚pɑːtɪklˠ̩z] in the groove of the record
(17) been told by [tɔ̘ːld ̚baɪ] that many people
In non-(t,d) clusters the same range of patterns is found, albeit to a much lesser
extent, as illustrated by (18) and (19):
(18) I’m trying to think now [θɪŋk̬naʊ] how I can make...
(19) just don’t ask me [ask ̚mi] for help
These examples demonstrate clearly that coronal-stop reflexes of (t,d) consonants
exhibit the same range of realisations as other singleton and cluster-final plosive
consonants when followed by a stop in connected speech. This observation on its
own poses no problem for the generally accepted account of (t,d), but we now turn
to some rather more problematic issues for that account.
2.2 Lenition
In this section I first compare the range of lenition patterns in (t,d) with that in
the comparator word-final consonants, then examine the possibility that there are
sociolinguistic constraints on (t,d) which might differentiate it from other cases of
full lenition at word boundaries; I next assess whether the contextual influences
on full (t,d) lenition are consistent with a CSP analysis or require specific phono-
logical rules, and finally I identify cooccurrence patterns with lenition of other
consonants in a given string.
2.2.1 Lenition patterns in word-final stops
In his commentary on Nolan’s (1992) discussion of alveolar-to-velar place assimi-
lation, Hayes proposes a general phonetic rule of word-final alveolar weakening,
on the grounds that, “[f ]or example, the segment /t/ is often weakened in its
articulation even when no other segment follows” (Hayes 1992: 284). In fact, very
few of the unambiguously realised (t,d) consonants are weakened alveolars in the
York data, but there is some evidence of the expected “continuum of phonetic