t/d deletion

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

But Arnold's quote is exactly what I said and merely supports my point: "t/d 
deletion [is] a specific case of consonant cluster reduction." That is, no 
isolated rule of "t/d deletion" that governs the change of FIND to FIN' exists 
that does not also govern the change of WASP to WAS' or RISK to RIS'. To say 
that the change of FIND to FIN' is an example of "t/d deletion" (1) is misleading 
because it implies that that is all there is to it and (2) it is confusing 
because there is no /t/ in FIND. It would be more accurate, and not much more 
trivial, to say just that the change of FIND to FIN' is an example of "d 
deletion."

It is arguably true that “… over the past thirty-five years, this phenomenon 
[i.e., consonant cluster reduction], has been studied in more detail than 
probably any other variable phonological phenomenon.” Indeed, many studies of CCR 
focus exclusively on the deletion of /t/ and /d/--in large part because, as 
Matt Gordon noted in an earlier posting--they are unique in that the "final 
clusters" often arise because of the addition of past-tense and past-participle 
morphemes to verb stems. Thus BAN becomes BANNED, WATCH becomes WATCHED, etc. 
In addition, the process creates otherwise impossible clusters: DRAG becomes 
DRAGGED, SLAM becomes SLAMMED, etc. All this has unquestionably made the special 
case of the deletion of t/d a [sic] "showcase variable." But the underlying 
phenomenon is still CCR, and the fundamental mechanism is still the CCR rule. 
To say that the change of FIND to FIN' is an example of "t/d deletion" is thus 
misleading also in that it associates the deletion represented by FIN(D) with 
the application of the deletion rule to environments that contain morpheme 
boundaries. However, the D of FIND is not a separate morpheme. It just simply 
gets deleted because final stops (and sometimes fricatives) get deleted when the 
sound that precedes them is the same in voicing (or, if you prefer, force of 
articulation).

In short, to say that FIN' is the result of "t/d deletion" is rather like 
saying "the study human/dog relations is a branch of the study of 
human/dog-parrot relations," rather than "... a branch of the study of human/pet relations"; 
and it is as misleading and confusing as it would be to say that the loss of 
the /z/ in HANS SOLO is an instance of "s/z deletion." The loss of /z/ in HANS 
SOLO is simply an instance of CCR. While second-place /s/ and /z/ do get 
deleted at the ends of words, in many varieties of speech the incidence is much 
higher when they are morphemes (JACK'S becomes JACK', HOPES (noun and verb) 
becomes HOPE'; far less frequently BOX becomes /bak/). Thus "s/z deletion" (like 
"t/d deletion") is a variationist label for a phonological phenomenon generally 
implicates the effects of morphophonemic processes. 


In a message dated 9/6/08 9:43:38 AM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes:


> from a thesis draft by Laura Staum Casasanto, Experimental
> Investigations of Sociolinguistic Knowledge:
> 
> The variable this dissertation will focus on is called t/d deletion, a
> specific case of
> consonant cluster reduction; it is a phonetic variable in English in
> which final coronal
> stops in consonant clusters may be deleted in some environments. Final
> t/d deletion is
> defined as the absence of a pronounced oral stop segment corresponding
> to a final t or d
> in words (Gregory et al. 1999).
> 
> ... This variable makes a good test case for the current hypothesis
> because “…over the
> past thirty-five years, this phenomenon has been studied in more
> detail than probably any
> other variable phonological phenomenon,”  (Coetzee, 2004).
> 
> quotation from (Patrick, 2006):
> 
> The study of (TD) has been the vehicle for several significant
> advances in variationist practice and theory: it has set standards for
> quantitative description (Labov et al 1968; Guy 1980), initiated
> quantitative cross-dialectal studies (Labov 1975), expanded the use of
> statistical methods within the discipline (Neu 1980), illuminated the
> acquisition of variable constraints by children (Labov 1989, Roberts
> 1995) and adults (Bayley 1991), and their continuing development among
> adult native speakers (Guy & Boyd 1990), identified contrasts and
> similarities between English and related Creole languages (Patrick
> 1992, 1999), and grounded explanations for variable processes in
> formal linguistic theory (Guy 1991, Reynolds 1994, Santa Ana 1996, Guy
> & Boberg 1997; but see Hudson 1997 for some interesting arguments).
> For these reasons, (TD) is a “showcase variable” (Patrick 1999), and
> its study has been crucial to our knowledge of language variation and
> change. - (Patrick, 2006)
> 
> Staum Casasanto supplies still more bibliography on (TD).
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> 




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