Lenition, fortition and the status of plosive affrication: the case of spontaneous RP English/t/

Abstract

This paper reports on a phonetic and phonological study of /t/-affrication in spontaneous British English Received Pronunciation. The study is motivated by the uncertainty surrounding plosive affrication in the literature on lenition and fortition. We suggest that a decision as to the status of a given pattern involving affrication in terms of lenition or fortition should be based on thorough phonetic and phonological analysis. We present a phonetic and phonological account of /t/-affrication, which takes into consideration the temporal and spectral characteristics of the sounds involved, as well as their distribution across phonological environments. Crucially, we compare affricated instances of /t/ with aspirated and fricated ones in the same dataset -the former arguably unmarked in this variety, the latter uncontroversially the result of lenition. We argue that the phonetic and phonological characteristics of /t/-affrication presented in this paper are consistent with an account in terms of fortition rather than lenition.

Word-final consonant epenthesis in Northeastern Nigerian English

“…BE is characterised by pre-pausal devoicing, since only voiceless stops, fricatives and affricates occur word-finally before a pause, resembling the Bena L1 pattern. Unlike in Bena but like in more standard varieties of NE, as well as British RP English (Buizza & Plug 2012), pre-pausal stops normally have audible release which may be strong enough to qualify as aspiration (figure 1a), and pre-pausally, occasionally even as a slight affrication (figure 1b). At times, pre-pausal oral stops are glottalised as in Bena but unlike in more standard varieties of NE, viz.…”

From categories to gradience: Auto-coding sociophonetic variation with random forests

“…Word-medial intervocalic /t/ is also subject to complex variation in NZE and other varieties, as it can undergo a multitude of phonological processes that include frication, voicing, flapping, and glottalization; Hay and Foulkes (2016) report at least ten variants. Unsurprisingly, the acoustic cues associated with variation in medial /t/ (and English /t/ in other contexts; Temple, 2014) are likewise complex; frication is associated with a greater center of gravity, spectral dispersion, and kurtosis (Jones & Llamas, 2008;Jones & McDougall, 2009), and shorter duration (Buizza & Plug, 2012); voicing is associated with the presence of periodicity (Riehl, 2003); flapping with weakened F2 and F3 (Warner & Tucker, 2011); and glottalization with decreased formant transitions (Docherty & Foulkes, 1999) and increased spectral tilt (Seyfarth & Garellek, 2015). Within sociolinguistics, to simplify this complex variation and facilitate statistical modeling, medial /t/ variants are sometimes collapsed into binary categories.…”

Variation in nasal–obstruent clusters and its influence on price and mouth in Scouse

“…There are some limited comments on the realisations of the stop in nasal-stop clusters in British English. Glottalisation (Docherty 1992) or affrication (Buizza & Plug 2012) of the stop may occur in nasal-stop clusters. While lenition of final stops is a well-known feature of Liverpool English (Wells 1982;Hughes & Trudgill 1996;Honeybone 2001), recent studies have shown that final stops preceded by nasals are unlikely to lenite (Honeybone 2001;Watson 2006).…”

“…In particular, there is a wide range of research dealing with variation in the realisation of nasal–stop clusters in American English (see, for example, Malécot 1960; Selkirk 1972; Ali et al 1979; Fujimura 1981; Cohn 1993; Guy & Boberg 1997; Zue & Laferriere 1997; Warner 2002). However, there has been comparatively little research on nasal–obstruent clusters in British English varieties (Docherty 1992; Buizza & Plug 2012).…”