earticle

영어

It is well-documented that coronal stops among others are subject to consonantal lenition such as deletion. Based on the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech, this paper analyzes variations of coronal stops between consonants over a word boundary. Results showed that coronal stops were commonly deleted across words. Specifically those in superlative and derivational suffixes were very often deleted, which is contradictory to the previous result. The underlying voicing contrast played a significant role in the variation in which voiceless coronal stops often underwent glottaling whereas voiced counterparts did not. When the preceding consonant was a lateral whose strength was inherently low, a coronal stop tended to be weakened to the glottal stop. When the following consonant was a stop, however, it was often deleted to minimize the effort to articulate. Also, word frequency was proven to be one of the most significant factors with regard to coronal stop deletion in the sense that low-frequency words were prone to resist more to deletion.