In English, a number of rules affect the realisation of a nasal consonant or a segment adjacent to a nasal consonant. These include rules of Anticipatory Nasalisation, e.g. bean /bin/ [bĩn]; Coronal Stop Deletion, e.g. kindness /kajndnes/ [kãjnnes]; Nasal Deletion and optionally Glottalisation, e.g. sent /sent/ [set] or [set'] (see Malécot 1960; Selkirk 1972; Kahn 1980 [1976]; Zue & Laferriere 1979). These rules, characterised largely on the basis of impressionistic data, are widely assumed to be phonological rules of English. Yet current views of the relationship between phonology and phonetics make the distinction between phono-logical rules and phonetic ones less automatic than once assumed and a reconsideration of the status of these rules is warranted. In the present article, I use phonetic data from English to investigate these rules. Based on these data, I argue that Anticipatory Nasalisation results from phonetic implementation rather than from a phonological rule, as previously assumed. It is shown that the basic patterns of nasalisation in English can be accounted for straightforwardly within a target-interpolation model. I then investigate the phonological status and phonetic realisation of Nasal Deletion, Coronal Stop Deletion and Glottalisation. The interaction of these rules yields some surprising results, in that glottalised /t/ [t'] is amenable to nasalisation.

This paper is a development of material from Honeybone (2001/2002). Versions of (some of) the material discussed here have been presented at the First Old World Conference in Phonology in Leiden, as a talk to the Philological Society in Cambridge, the Linguistics Association of Great Britain in Oxford, and as a job interview presentation in Edinburgh. I am grateful to the audiences there for their comments, and in particular to Phil Carr, Abigail Cohn, April McMahon, and the editors and reviewers for this volume for comments, questions and information at various stages of its development. Of course, this by no means implies that any of the above necessarily share or support my analysis or approach, and any errors in this piece are my own. 2 For some discussion of the notions 'reference variety' and 'non-reference variety', see Honeybone (2001); in line with one tradition of terminology, I often use the terms 'reference' and 'non-reference' in what follows, where other traditions might use 'standard' and 'non-standard'.

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Studies of phonological assimilation have played a central role in the development of current phonological theory. As widely discussed in the literature, assimilation is an extremely common phonological process cross-linguistically and therefore an adequate phonological theory should represent it simply and naturally. This has led to the current view of assimilation as spreading (Clements 1976; Goldsmith 1976; Hayes 1986; among others). Much less work has addressed itself to the issue of dissimilation, but recently it has been suggested that dissimilation should be analysed as delinking followed by default fill-in (Odden 1987; Poser 1987; McCarthy 1988; Yip 1988).