This paper highlights a hitherto unreported change in progress among northern speakers of British English, with increasing post-nasal [ɡ]-presence in words like
External sandhi processes, where a phonological alternation is triggered across word boundaries, have been subject to extensive study, particularly with respect to locality restrictions on their application and the implications this has for theories of speech planning (see
The variable presence of post-nasal [ɡ] in words such as
This paper provides evidence that variation in [ŋɡ] clusters, hereafter denoted by (ng) using standard sociolinguistic convention, is less stable than previously thought; specifically, the behaviour of (ng) in pre-pausal position appears to be undergoing change in apparent time, whereby younger speakers are reanalyzing this environment as one that favours [ɡ]-presence. The primary goal of this paper is to investigate the mechanisms underlying this innovation, specifically to disentangle the collinearity between three factors that on the surface appear to condition this effect: segmental duration, prosodic boundary strength, and the presence/duration of a following pause. In doing so, this study adds to a growing body of evidence outlining how probabilistic lenition processes behave before phrasal boundaries, and its results have implications for ongoing research into the conditioning factors of external sandhi.
Drawing upon production data from an elicitation task, it is shown that the probability of surface [ɡ]-presence is most strongly correlated with the duration of pause that follows it, independent of the word’s position in the utterance or intonational phrase. The presence of a following pause is also highly collinear with the duration of the preceding nasal due to the effects of pre-boundary segmental lengthening, but the former is a much stronger predictor of the variation in [ɡ]-presence. Thus, velar nasal plus in northern English dialects shows no evidence of direct reference to segmental duration (cf.
The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2.1 introduces velar nasal plus and outlines the current body of knowledge regarding how its patterns of variation are structured along social and language-internal dimensions; Section 2.2 provides a summary of the literature on how pausal boundaries affect other probabilistic external sandhi processes, and highlights a number of ways in which the conditioning of external sandhi has been accounted for in phonological theory; the discussion of pre-boundary lengthening in Section 2.3 foregrounds the collinearity issues explored in this paper, whose research goals are then re-stated in Section 2.4.
The methodology undertaken for this study is outlined in Section 3, detailing the methods of data collection and in particular how the elicitations were carefully designed in order to invoke different magnitudes of pre-boundary lengthening. The results of this study are split into two subsections: Section 4.1 presents evidence from sociolinguistic interviews of a change in apparent time with respect to the rates of [ɡ]-presence pre-pausally, and Section 4.2 addresses the primary goal of this paper by exploring how this innovation is represented in speakers’ grammars through analysis of an elicited reading task. Although the focus of this paper is to uncover the precise mechanisms that condition this innovation, discussed in Section 5.1, part of the discussion is also dedicated to addressing the social and/or internal factors that actually motivate this change; in Section 5.2, a number of possibilities are proposed, specifically whether this diachronic change reflects a shift in the social meaning and evaluation of the local form, or stems from the inherent variability of external sandhi processes compared with word-internal phenomena.
It should be pointed out that post-nasal [ɡ] was once present across all varieties of English, before it began to undergo deletion in the Late Modern English period. Bermúdez-Otero and Trousdale (
Although this coda-targeting deletion rule ran to completion in most varieties of English, the non-coalesced [ŋɡ] form was not lost everywhere; variation in (ng) still exists today in these varieties spoken in the North West and West Midlands of England. Although we know very little about the synchronic variation of (ng) in these communities, the presence of post-nasal [ɡ] is well-documented in the dialectological literature (e.g.,
While variation in (ng) does historically stem from a deletion rule, it is possible that at this point in time the synchronic system does not work that way, and that some tokens of post-nasal [ɡ] surface instead from an insertion process. Determining whether or not this is the case is beyond the scope of this paper, and as such the subsequent discussion of (ng) variation will remain theory neutral, referring only to presence or absence of [ɡ] and not to the process assumed to underpin this variation.
The observation that [ɡ]-presence is favoured before pause, with which this paper is primarily concerned, has not been discussed explicitly in other studies. However, the observation that (ng) shows strong stylistic stratification could provide supportive evidence for this effect; both Mathisen (
A number of studies seem to suggest that the local non-coalesced form, in which post-nasal [ɡ] is present, is increasing in popularity with younger speakers, though few actually provide quantitative evidence in support of such claims. Asprey (
Since very little work has been carried out on the language-internal factors influencing (ng), specifically its sensitivity to phonological and prosodic environment and its behaviour pre-pausally, we can instead turn to comparable external sandhi processes that have been subject to more extensive variationist study. One such example is /t,d/-deletion in varieties of English: the reduction of word-final consonant clusters ending with a coronal stop e.g.,
Most importantly for the present study, both processes show sensitivity to the immediate phonological context and do so in an identical manner: [ɡ]-presence is more likely pre-vocalically than pre-consonantally (
More recent studies have done away with a categorical coding of pause presence/absence altogether, and instead incorporated pause duration as a gradient factor; Tanner, Sonderegger, and Wagner (
Formal accounts of external sandhi conditioning, specifically the mechanisms that trigger this sensitivity to phonological environment, have also often focused on /t,d/-deletion. A number of explanations of the ‘following segment effect’ have been proposed, with the goal of capturing not just the consistent observation that deletion is more likely pre-consonantally than pre-vocalically, but also the variability of deletion pre-pausally. It has been argued (e.g.,
Alternative explanations make reference to the Obligatory Contour Principle (J. J.
Coetzee (
These processes are uncontroversially leniting and therefore any comparison with (ng), which as discussed earlier could conceivably be a case of synchronic [ɡ]-insertion, should be taken with some degree of caution. However, it remains the case that there are clear parallels between these three processes with respect to their phrase-level conditioning: The varying segments ([ɡ], [t]/[d], and [s]) are present before vowel-initial words, absent before consonant-initial words, and show unusual and inconsistent behaviour pre-pausally. In the case of (td)-deletion and (s)-weakening, this registers itself as differences in pausal effects between different varieties, and in the case of (ng) as diachronic instability, as will be illustrated in Section 4.1.
One often over-looked aspect of how pauses influence variable linguistic phenomena is the way in which they affect suprasegmental features, specifically phonetic duration. It has been observed cross-linguistically that segments in pre-boundary position are longer in duration than those not adjacent to a prosodic boundary. Many reports focus on Indo-European languages (see
It is generally considered that pre-boundary lengthening is triggered directly by finality in a prosodic constituent, with the magnitude of lengthening correlated with the size of the constituent in the phonological hierarchy (
Given that stronger boundaries elicit longer pauses and greater segmental lengthening, the collinearity between these three factors raises questions regarding the nature of these reported ‘pre-pausal’ effects. What if the effects of a following pause sometimes reflect something more granular, i.e., sensitivity to duration? This was explored by Sproat and Fujimura (
Much like with the parallels drawn between (ng) and (td) in the preceding section, I do not mean to suggest that (ng) and /l/-darkening are comparable variables; this is particularly important in the case of /l/ given that it is not only uncontroversially leniting but also of a non-deleting type. However, regardless of the similarities and differences between these processes, it is possible that the same durational mechanism applies in the case of (ng), even if it is interpreted as insertion. Given that such an insertion process only requires a slight change in gestural timing, where the velum is raised before rather than after cessation of the oral gesture, it would hardly be surprising to find it showing sensitivity to the preceding nasal duration.
In light of the current knowledge summarized in the previous section, this study aims to accomplish two things: to provide evidence of a hitherto-unreported change in progress towards increasing [ɡ]-presence among young speakers, restricted to pre-pausal contexts, and then to solve the collinearity between various boundary phenomena by investigating three related prosodic factors that potentially condition this change.
Solving this collinearity issue has wide implications for a number of theoretical approaches that make predictions with respect to what should condition such an effect. A classical Prosodic Phonology approach to external sandhi processes (
On the other hand, there are theories of lenition (e.g.,
Finally, recent years have seen a rise in theories that emphasize the psycholinguistic processing of language, such as the Production Planning Hypothesis (
It is important to consider these three factors separately at both the conceptual and empirical level, despite the strong collinear relationship between them. Although it has been shown that pause is the most important acoustic cue to the perception of intonational phrasing (see
This paper seeks to uncover the relative contributions made by these three boundary phenomena (prosodic boundary strength, segmental duration, and pause presence/duration) in boosting [ɡ]-presence in northern British English, and by doing so will contribute to our knowledge of how external sandhi processes operate in pre-boundary position.
This study takes a two-pronged approach in answering the research questions posed in the preceding section, and it does so by drawing upon two complementary sources of data: a collection of sociolinguistic interviews, and a follow-up elicitation task with a similar population sample. These two methods of data collection have complementary strengths and weaknesses, and an analysis that makes use of both is therefore better-equipped to provide an accurate description of the variation. The interviews contain naturalistic language that is often the subject of variationist analysis; these will be used to provide empirical evidence of a change in progress among North Western subjects. The elicitations, on the other hand, allow for careful control over the environments in which the dependent variable appears, which is a crucial component of this investigation into the behaviour of (ng) at various linguistic boundaries; these will be used to provide insight into factors that condition the afore-mentioned change.
All recordings were made using a Sony PCM-M10 recorder and a lavalier microphone attached to the participant, saved at a 44.1 KHz sampling rate in uncompressed WAV format.
The naturalistic component of the data consists of 32 sociolinguistic interviews, most of which took place during a two-year period from 2015 to 2017. In the following sub-sections I provide detail on the demographics of the participants and the interview process itself.
The population sample consists of 32 speakers (17 female; 15 male), all of whom were born in the North West of England with a large majority born and raised in Greater Manchester. Their date of births range from 1907 to 1998, with two interviews conducted in 1971 included to provide extra time depth to the apparent time analysis of (ng). Socioeconomic status was controlled for by only interviewing upper working class speakers, with this classification based broadly on occupation following the methods of Baranowski (
The sociolinguistic interviews were conducted one-on-one with the participants. Following guidance from Tagliamonte (
These interviews were conducted as part of a wider variationist investigation of (ng), and as such they were also coded for a number of linguistic factors such as the immediate preceding/following phonological context, word frequency, speech rate, and part of speech, among others. Tokens were coded as being ‘pre-pausal’ when final in an ELAN breath group; broadly speaking these tokens are followed by a period of silence lasting approximately 100 ms or longer.
While the conversational data provides a reliable insight into how (ng) varies in naturalistic speech, an elicitation task is required to tease apart the various collinear boundary phenomena that potentially condition this variation. For this elicitation task, subjects were asked to read out a list of sentences as naturally as possible and at their own pace. Each sentence contained exactly one token of (ng) before a particular linguistic boundary, detailed in Section 3.2.2, and they were presented one at a time on a laptop screen. In the following sub-sections I provide further information about the sample population and the design of elicitation stimuli.
The elicitation task was conducted with 30 speakers from the North West of England, many of whom were also subjects of the sociolinguistic interviews detailed in Section 3.1. These 30 speakers form a balanced population sample with respect to age and sex (see Table
The age and sex distribution of informants for the elicitation task. Cells include the average age of each group, with N denoting number of subjects. ‘Young’ speakers are aged between 18 and 30; ‘old’ speakers are aged between 52 and 85.
Male | Female | |
---|---|---|
24 yrs |
24 yrs |
|
60 yrs |
60 yrs |
Five linguistic boundaries of different perceived ‘strengths’ are under consideration here, based primarily on the stimuli chosen by Sproat and Fujimura (
NP-internal boundary: immediately followed by the head of an NP
e.g., She was given [the wro
VP-internal boundary: immediately followed by the direct object in a double object construction
e.g., She gave [the ri
VP boundary: immediately followed by an NP/VP juncture
e.g., [The sti
Intonational phrase boundary: final in the intonational phrase
e.g., [“It’s a traditional thi
Utterance boundary: final in the utterance
e.g., [The drink was surprisingly stro
Because the words under consideration contain two sonorous segments upon which the effects of lengthening can be registered (see
The impact of boundary strength on the sonorant duration of (ng) tokens.
Each boundary context was represented eight times in the sentence list, equally distributed by phonological context such that each
In total, 40 sentences were elicited per participant (5 boundaries × 2 preceding segments × 2 following segments × 2 repetitions), yielding a total of 1,200 tokens; these sentences are given in full in the Appendix.
The recordings were all transcribed orthographically using ELAN and force-aligned with the FAVE suite (
Although recent work has probed the ability of forced alignment to also automatically code for linguistic variation (e.g.,
Example spectrograms and waveforms of
Although the stimuli were designed to control intonational phrasing, with boundaries 1–3 intended to elicit IP-medial tokens and boundaries 4–5 IP-final tokens, this was independently clarified through intonational analysis. Pitch contours consisting of 64,644 dynamic pitch measurements were extracted, manually corrected, and smoothed using the
The results of this study will be presented in two complementary sub-sections: The first part of the analysis draws upon sociolinguistic interview data to provide evidence of change in apparent time (Section 4.1); in the second part of this analysis (Section 4.2), attention turns to the follow-up elicitation task with the goal of probing the precise factors that condition this innovation.
All logistic regression models reported in this section were fit using the
Although there have already been reports that rates of [ɡ]-presence are increasing in a number of communities, summarized earlier in Section 2.1, the interaction between age (or date of birth) and phonological environment with respect to [ɡ]-presence has yet to be investigated. Figure
Change in apparent time of pre-pausal [ɡ]-presence, based on a sample of 32 speakers. Pre-consonantal rates given for comparison. Points reflect individual speaker means; lines reflect linear models fit to the two environments with shaded areas representing 95% confidence intervals.
It should be noted that there also seems to be a slight increase in [ɡ]-presence pre-consonantally, but this trend is much less dramatic and the correlation is not statistically significant (Spearman’s
This apparent diachronic change affecting pre-pausal velar nasal plus finds statistical support from the results of mixed-effects logistic regression, where the interaction between phonological environment and date of birth is significant for the pre-pausal tokens but does not pass the threshold for significance pre-consonantally (see Table
Mixed-effects logistic regression model for the interaction between following segment and date of birth; includes random intercepts of speaker and word. [ɡ]-presence as application value. Vowel as reference group.
Fixed effects | Estimate | z-value | Pr (>|z|) | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
(Intercept) | 1.2142 | 0.2551 | 4.760 | <0.001 | *** |
pause | 1.1458 | 0.2800 | 4.092 | <0.001 | *** |
consonant | –2.8466 | 0.2382 | –11.951 | <0.001 | *** |
pause:dob | 1.0632 | 0.2464 | 4.315 | <0.001 | *** |
consonant:dob | 0.1431 | 0.1716 | 0.834 | 0.404 | |
date of birth (scaled) | 0.0738 | 0.1962 | 0.376 | 0.707 |
Although there are a number of benefits to analyzing the conversational data discussed in the previous section, most notably the fact that this is a naturalistic speech style and therefore more representative of the speakers’ vernaculars, it is not without fault. One particular limitation is that a dichotomy between whether or not a token of (ng) is followed by a pause actually conflates a number of prosodic environments and interactional situations; in reality, these pre-pausal tokens may encompass a wide range of contexts, e.g., turn-final, utterance-final, IP-final etc. Is there an absence of segmental material following the (ng) token because the speaker was interrupted, or was the pause just temporary, with the speaker then resuming their turn? Pauses may arise for a number of different reasons, whether they be cognitively or interactionally motivated (see
To combat this shortcoming, the second part of this study’s analysis focuses on the follow-up elicitation task where the exact environments in which (ng) clusters appear can be carefully controlled using reading passage stimuli. In this way, efforts can be made to disentangle the collinearity between the three factors that on the surface appear to be boosting [ɡ]-presence: phonetic duration, prosodic boundary strength, and pause presence/duration.
Figure
Rate of [ɡ]-presence by boundary strength and following segment.
The relative lack of variation pre-vocalically is no great surprise, and is likely due to the fact that there are two competing forces promoting the presence of [ɡ] in this environment: one that favours [ɡ]-presence before stronger boundaries, as we can see with the pre-consonantal tokens, but also one that favours [ɡ]-presence in weaker boundary contexts; crucially, this latter effect is confined to the pre-vocalic environment. If we assume that variation in (ng) is derived from a coda-targeting deletion rule, and that the promoting effect of following vowels on the probability of [ɡ]-presence stems from phrase-level resyllabification of the [ɡ] into onset position, it logically follows that this effect is more likely when the juncture between the words is weaker.
In the pre-consonantal environment, we do clearly see a monotonic increase in [ɡ]-presence correlated with the strength of the following juncture. However, the rates of [ɡ] do not increase in a gradual manner parallel to the phonetically-gradient relationship between boundary strength and segmental duration; instead, we see a stark contrast between boundaries 1–3 and 4–5, suggesting that the meaningful contrast is between IP-medial and IP-final position. However, sensitivity to IP boundaries alone would not account for the contrasting behaviour of (ng) clusters between boundaries 4 and 5; in the former (utterance-medial IP boundary) we see 53% [ɡ]-presence, whereas in the latter (utterance-final IP boundary) we find rates almost at ceiling level (96%).
Pause presence/duration provides a possible explanation for this contrast, in addition to showing the strongest correlation with the presence of post-nasal [ɡ]. The use of [ŋɡ] is more variable at the utterance-medial IP boundary (i.e., boundary 4) because here the prosodic phrasing and, in particular, presence of pause is also variable (cf. the utterance-final IP boundary which is always pre-pausal). This is shown in Figure
The relationship between sonorant duration, following pause duration, and [ɡ]-presence for pre-consonantal (ng) tokens. Tokens with no period of silence before the following word are excluded. Ellipses represent 95% confidence intervals for tokens with and without surface [ɡ]-presence.
What is perhaps most interesting to note from Figure
To investigate the effects of pause and IP position independently, there need to exist tokens of (ng) where the pausal cue to major prosodic boundaries is absent on the surface. Figure
However, the ability to tease apart these two collinear effects does not rest solely on the presence of such tokens, where IP boundaries are not marked by pause. If there are cases of IP-medial tokens that
Pitch contours and ToBI annotation for two pre-pausal tokens in the IP-medial context: one genuinely IP-medial in
Mixed-effects logistic regression lends further support to the idea that the presence and duration of pause is the primary conditioning factor of (ng). Three individual models were initially fit, including a main predictor of either: (1) sonorant duration, (2) IP position (based on what was actually produced, rather than what was intended by the stimulus), or (3) following pause duration, in addition to random intercepts of speaker and word. These models were compared for ‘goodness of fit’ based on their AIC values to determine which predictor explains most of the variation in (ng), where lower values correspond to a better model. These comparisons, summarized in Table
AIC comparison between models, all of which include random intercepts of speaker and word. All additions to the base models lead to significant increases in model fit by ANOVA comparison (
Sole predictor | With sonorant duration | With pause duration | |
---|---|---|---|
Sonorant duration |
562.30 | NA | 271.72 |
Position in IP |
358.80 | 348.50 | 267.44 |
Pause duration |
272.70 | 271.72 | NA |
Models were then fit with a combination of these predictors to investigate the possibility of additive effects, which could be the case if (ng) is conditioned by multiple phonetic cues to boundary strength. ANOVA comparisons between nested models were conducted to quantify whether or not the increase in the amount of variation explained by these additional predictors offsets the cost of a more complex model. In doing this, it became apparent that the strong predictive power of pause duration does not mean that the other collinear variables play no role; adding IP position to a model with pause duration leads to a decrease in AIC that, although small, is statistically significant (267.44, cf. 272.69;
Best-fitting logistic regression model; [ɡ]-presence as application value, with random intercepts of speaker and word.
Fixed effects | Estimate | z-value | Pr (>|z|) | ||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
(Intercept) | –10.5752 | 1.7062 | –6.198 | <0.001 | *** |
1.8094 | 0.6845 | 2.644 | 0.008 | ** | |
Pause duration |
1.9990 | 0.3574 | 5.593 | <0.001 | *** |
I would now like to address two separate aspects of the variation discussed here: the mechanisms of this innovation in velar nasal plus, and the implications this has for our understanding of how external sandhi processes are conditioned in pre-boundary environments, and also the possible motivations driving this change.
Having successfully ‘disentangled’ the collinearity between what on the surface appeared to be effects of nasal duration (with increasing [ɡ]-presence after longer nasals), prosodic position (with more [ɡ]-presence IP-finally), and following pause (with higher rates of [ɡ]-presence pre-pausally), the results indicate that this innovation in (ng) is conditioned most strongly by the presence/duration of a following pause. This would of course suggest that the apparent relationship between post-nasal [ɡ]-presence and sonorant duration is indirect and stems only from the fact that segmental duration is increased pre-pausally. There is limited evidence to suggest that (ng) is also directly sensitive to prosodic boundary strength; IP position explains a small amount of variation independently of pause, but comparisons between these two predictors suggests that this effect is much smaller in magnitude.
The important role of pause is perhaps best visualized abstractly, as in Figure
Visualization of the distribution of pauses and IP boundaries in this study’s dataset, and the effect they have upon [ɡ]-presence.
That this innovation seems to be conditioned most strongly by the presence/absence of pause, rather than by segmental duration or prosodic boundary strength, is rather interesting in light of previous studies that have also attempted to tease apart these factors for other external sandhi processes, e.g., /s/-debuccalization in Spanish. Kaisse (
More recently, it has been shown that other processes exhibit rather more complex behaviour in pre-boundary environments. Kilbourn-Ceron (
No other putative pre-pausal effects have, to this author’s knowledge, been investigated from this perspective; however, this interplay between prosody, pause, and segmental duration does raise questions about the nature of similar effects that have been reported for other external sandhi processes (most notably /t,d/-deletion, as discussed in Section 2.2), which could form a fruitful avenue of further research.
While the quantitative analysis discussed in this paper has made it possible to determine the mechanisms of this innovation, the motivations behind pre-pausal [ɡ]-presence have thus far been neglected.
This relatively recent pre-pausal innovation could have been triggered by language-internal factors, specifically by the very nature of how synchronic ‘following segment effects’ are stored and processed in speakers’ grammars. As discussed in Section 2.2, the effect of following consonants in promoting /t,d/-deletion, and of following vowels in inhibiting it, has been analyzed under the Obligatory Contour Principle (
We can also turn to an entirely different process, of voiceless stop ejectivization, in search for possible explanations. Ejectivization of the English voiceless plosive set /p, t, k/ has been attested by many scholars (
This innovation could also be driven by external factors; that is, it could be socially-motivated. Utterance/phrase-final position is highly salient,
The goal of this study was to investigate the mechanisms of a recent innovation in post-nasal [ɡ]-presence, and in doing so explore the collinear relationship between prosodic boundary strength, pause, and segmental duration in conditioning external sandhi processes. In teasing apart these three factors, all of which on the surface appear to affect the probability of [ɡ]-presence, this study has shown that their relative contributions in conditioning (ng) variation are far from equal. The presence and duration of a following pause provides the strongest explanation of probabilistic [ɡ]-presence; the additive effect of IP position overlaid on this is much weaker, despite theoretical frameworks that foreground the importance of prosodic categories in conditioning external sandhi (e.g.,
The results of this study add to a growing body of knowledge about how probabilistic lenition processes behave in pre-boundary position, and in doing so raise questions regarding the nature of similar effects that have previously been attributed to one of these collinear factors without due consideration of the others.
The process that gives rise to (ng) variation, whether that be a synchronic deletion or insertion rule, bears a striking resemblance to /t,d/-deletion in a number of ways, most notably the strong effect of following segment which sees the word-final consonant cluster licensed pre-vocalically but not pre-consonantally; however, where /t,d/-deletion shows inter-dialectal variation with respect to its behaviour pre-pausally, [ŋɡ] clusters instead show inter-generational variation, with younger speakers reanalyzing this pre-pausal environment as one that favours use of the local form with [ɡ]-presence.
This shibboleth of north western dialects, the variable presence of a feature that has been lost in almost all other varieties of English spoken throughout the British Isles, is yet another example of the oft-discussed linguistic conservatism of the north of England. However, in light of the results reported here, this feature is clearly less stable than previously thought; although this variation in (ng) began some time in the Early Modern English period, it still exhibits interesting behaviour today, and even appears to be undergoing a revitalization in this community. Far more than a mere relic of traditional northern dialects, this variation in (ng) clusters offers valuable insight into the diachronic trajectory of phonological processes (
The additional file for this article can be found as follows:
Sentence list stimulus for experiment. DOI:
Whilst post-nasal [ɡ] also occurs in unstressed
Word-medial tokens were also collected, but had to be discarded from the analysis due to a confound of epenthesis; the (ng) tokens before consonant-initial suffixes (e.g.,
For the word-final (ng) tokens, the following consonant was almost always a non-lingual obstruent to prevent possible confounds of assimilation or phrase-level resyllabification of the word-final [ɡ]. The only exception to this is in the case of one IP-boundary elicitation, where the (ng) token is followed by a non-lingual sonorant /m/.
Although not plotted in Figure
The likelihood of phrase-level resyllabification being the source of this phonological environment effect is further increased by the independent observation that resyllabification across word boundaries is more likely when the following word, to which the [ɡ] is attaching, has non-initial stress (
For psycholinguistic evidence of the salience of utterance-final position, see Sundara, Demuth, and Kuhl (
This work would not have been possible without the generous funding of the Economic and Social Research Council (NWDTC studentship, grant number ES/J500094/1), or the speakers who were equally generous in giving up their time for this research. I am also indebted to Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Maciej Baranowski, and Laurel MacKenzie for their guidance and insightful feedback, to the audiences at FWAV4, NWAV45, and the 25th Manchester Phonology Meeting for their questions, and finally to the
The author has no competing interests to declare.