The P* reading group will be meeting againthis Monday, 5 February at 15:30 in room 002 (and on Zoom, at the following link). This week, Irene will be leading discussion on Abigail Cohn’s 1993 paper Nasalization in English: phonology or phonetics. The PDF is attached, and also available on the Google Drive. Here’s the abstract:
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/ [bin]; Coronal Stop Deletion, e.g. kindness /kajndnɛs/ [kɑ̃j̃nnɛs]; Nasal Deletion and optionally Glottalisation, e.g. sent /sɛnt/ [sɛ̃t] or [sɛ̃t’] (see Malecot 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 phonological 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.
The full schedule for the semester is available here.