This paper is a development of material from Honeybone (2001/2002). Versions of (some of) the material discussed here have been presented at the First Old World Conference in Phonology in Leiden, as a talk to the Philological Society in Cambridge, the Linguistics Association of Great Britain in Oxford, and as a job interview presentation in Edinburgh. I am grateful to the audiences there for their comments, and in particular to Phil Carr, Abigail Cohn, April McMahon, and the editors and reviewers for this volume for comments, questions and information at various stages of its development. Of course, this by no means implies that any of the above necessarily share or support my analysis or approach, and any errors in this piece are my own. 2 For some discussion of the notions 'reference variety' and 'non-reference variety', see Honeybone (2001); in line with one tradition of terminology, I often use the terms 'reference' and 'non-reference' in what follows, where other traditions might use 'standard' and 'non-standard'.

This article integrates aspects of synchronic and diachronic phonological theory with points relevant to the study of a nonreference accent in order to investigate the patterns of consonantal lenition found in the variety of English spoken in Liverpool, England. Points of contact with variationist approaches are addressed, partly because the lenitions are variable processes. An implicational understanding of lenition is developed, thanks to which it is possible to describe the prosodic and melodic environments which inhibit the lenitions. New data from a small corpus investigation into Liverpool English are presented and a theoretical and practical methodology is proposed, which enables the data to be investigated. The descriptive focus is on the segments /t/ and /k/, which are typically realized as affricates or fricatives unless the lenition is inhibited. A notion of`melodic lenition inhibition' is developed to account for some of the inhibitory patterns, whereby the sharing of autosegmental phonological elements gives a segment strength' in certain environments.English Language and Linguistics 5.2: 213±249. # Cambridge University Press 2001

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Accents and dialects of English and Scots in Britain have been under active investigation for many decades, as reported through the Survey of English Dialects (Orton et al. 1962–71) and the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (Mather et al. 1975–86), Wells’ three-volume compendium (1982), and a host of detailed studies of individual varieties. There are also welcome recent signs of the reintegration of variation data into theoretical discussion (see Henry 2002, Cornips & Corrigan 2005a and Trousdale & Adger 2007 for morphosyntax, as well as Anttila 2002 and Coetzee & Pater 2011 for phonology). Nonetheless, the precise structural, geolinguistic and sociolinguistic patterning of many features of vernacular Englishes in the UK is still largely unknown.