Redevelopment of a Morphological Class

Penn Working Papers in Linguistics

Abstract

Coronal stop deletion (or‚TD Deletion‚) is the paradigm sociolinguistic variable. It was first described in African American English (Labov et al., 1968) as a rule whereby word final /Ct/ and /Cd/ clusters simplify by deleting the coronal stop. It has since been found in many dialects and varieties of English. Aside from the very regular phonological and phonetic factors which condition whether TD Deletion applies, morphological structure also appears to have an effect. The three morphological categories of primary interest are (i) monomorphemes}, (ii) regular past tense verbs and (iii) semiweak past tense verbs. In almost every dialect studied, the order of morphological classes from least favoring deletion to most favoring deletion is as given in (1). (1) monomorphemes > semiweak > regular past tense In this paper, I will be focusing on the difference between semiweak and regular past tense. I will pursue a revised version of the analysis in Guy & Boyd (1990), casting it in terms of Competing Grammars and Distributed Morphology. Specifically, I will propose that the rate of phonological TD Deletion is the same for the regular past and the semiweak. What leads to higher TD Absence in the semiweak verbs is variable morphological absence of /t/, i.e., there is a competing morphological analysis where the past tense of keep is simply “kep”, instead of “kept”.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@article{fruehwald2012,
  author = {Fruehwald, Josef},
  editor = {Fruehwald, Josef},
  title = {Redevelopment of a {Morphological} {Class}},
  journal = {Penn Working Papers in Linguistics},
  volume = {18},
  number = {1},
  pages = {77-86},
  date = {2012},
  url = {http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol18/iss1/10/},
  langid = {en},
  abstract = {Coronal stop deletion (or‚`TD Deletion‚`) is the paradigm
    sociolinguistic variable. It was first described in African American
    English (Labov et al., 1968) as a rule whereby word final /Ct/ and
    /Cd/ clusters simplify by deleting the coronal stop. It has since
    been found in many dialects and varieties of English. Aside from the
    very regular phonological and phonetic factors which condition
    whether TD Deletion applies, morphological structure also appears to
    have an effect. The three morphological categories of primary
    interest are (i) monomorphemes\}, (ii) regular past tense verbs and
    (iii) semiweak past tense verbs. In almost every dialect studied,
    the order of morphological classes from least favoring deletion to
    most favoring deletion is as given in (1). (1) monomorphemes
    \textgreater{} semiweak \textgreater{} regular past tense In this
    paper, I will be focusing on the difference between semiweak and
    regular past tense. I will pursue a revised version of the analysis
    in Guy \& Boyd (1990), casting it in terms of Competing Grammars and
    Distributed Morphology. Specifically, I will propose that the rate
    of phonological TD Deletion is the same for the regular past and the
    semiweak. What leads to higher TD Absence in the semiweak verbs is
    variable morphological absence of /t/, i.e., there is a competing
    morphological analysis where the past tense of keep is simply “kep”,
    instead of “kept”.}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Fruehwald, Josef. 2012. “Redevelopment of a Morphological Class.” Edited by Josef Fruehwald. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 18 (1): 77–86. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol18/iss1/10/.