The production and phonetic representation of fake geminates in English

Abstract

The current study focused on the production of non-contrastive geminates across different boundary types in English to investigate the hypothesis that word-internal heteromorphemic geminates may differ from those that arise across a word boundary. In this study, word-internal geminates arising from affixation, and described as either assimilated or concatenated, were matched to heteromorphemic geminates arising from sequences of identical consonants that spanned a word boundary and to word-internal singletons. Word-internal geminates were found to be longer than matched singletons in absolute and relative terms. By contrast, heteromorphemic geminates that occurred at word boundaries were only longer than matched singletons in absolute terms. In addition, heteromorphemic geminates in two word phrases were typically “pulled apart” in careful speech; that is, speakers marked the boundaries between free morphemes with pitch changes and pauses. Morpheme boundaries in words with bound affixes were very rarely highlighted in this way. These results are taken to indicate that most word-internal heteromorphemic geminates are represented as a single long consonant in the speech plan rather than as a consonant sequence. Only those geminates that arise in two word phrases exhibit phonetic characteristics that are fully consistent with the representation of two identical consonants crossing a morpheme boundary.

“Fake” gemination in suffixed words and compounds in English and German

“…Phrases with adjacent identical segments (e.g., clean nest), on the other hand, are considered two independent prosodic words (cf. Table I) and a difference in relative duration between word-internal and wordboundary geminates has been shown in a previous study (Oh and Redford, 2012).…”

“…The heteromorphemic sequences of identical consonants which we find in English and German, and which are often described as "fake" geminates (Kenstowicz and Pyle, 1973;Schein and Steriade, 1986;Hayes, 1986;Oh and Redford, 2012), may not always behave like "real" (lexical) geminates in every way. For instance, an underlying geminate will never allow an epenthetic vowel or pause to intervene (VC i C i V > *VC i aC i V; see Kenstowicz and Pyle, 1973, pp.…”

“…In line with previous literature (e.g., cf. Oh and Redford, 2012) we refer to these consonantal sequences as "fake geminates" since consonantal duration is not otherwise contrastive in present-day English or German.…”

“…In present-day English, identical adjacent segments resulting from prefixation with, for example, in-and un-have been shown to still lead to gemination (cf. Oh and Redford, 2012) while in German prefixes result in mandatory degemination (cf. Wiese, 1996, p. 231).…”

Degemination in Hungarian: Phonology or phonetics?

“…1 On the small overall functional load of geminate consonants in Hungarian, see Obendorfer (1975). On geminates and gemination in general, see Delattre (1971); Lehiste et al (1973); Pickett et al (1999); Ham (2001); Ringen & Vago (2011);Oh & Redford (2012), as well as Davis (2011) and further literature cited there. On various aspects of (and approaches to) degemination in Hungarian, see also Nádasdy (1989); Dressler & Siptár (1989); Siptár & Törkenczy (2000), and Polgárdi (2008).…”