영어 어말 설단폐쇄음의 탈락 양상: 고빈도 단어를 중심으로

Abstract

Word frequency exerts a strong influence on coronal stop deletion. In general, high frequency words undergo word-final coronal stop deletion at a higher rate than low frequency words. This deletion process is undergone in consonant cluster simplification for economy of articulation. This study aims to investigate aspects of English word-final coronal stop deletion across a word boundary in high frequency words. Data were extracted from the Buckeye Corpus of Spontaneous American English Speech depending on morphological, phonological, phonetic and sociolinguistic variations. The results showed that different phonological environments favored one type of coronal stop variations such as [t], flapping, glottaling and deletion. Deletion was most prevalent for coronal stops in C/t,d/#C environment while coronal stops frequently underwent flapping in V/t,d/#V environment. In C/t,d/#C environment adjacent identical features were prohibited (Obligatory Contour Principle). More specifically, when the preceding consonants were more similar to coronal stops, the rate of coronal stop deletion was higher. The following consonants also influenced the coronal stop deletion. The rate of deletion was higher before sonorants than before obstruents. Therefore, actual education of coronal stop deletion should be done depending on various environments and factors.