On the assimilation of root-final coronals in English deverbal nouns

Abstract EN

This paper claims that the derivation of a large number of English nominals from their formally and semantically related verbs can he made possible in terms of a formal rule of assimilation.

The study is corpus- hascd, and no appeal is being made to historical considerations or to the written form of the language.

Rather, the phonemic form of the verb is posited underlyingly, where a morphological rule of suffixation must apply first.

For this purpose.

738 verbs have teen secured, as transcribed first, from Daniel Jones 'English Pronouncing Dictionary^ 14th ed).

The model proposed is descriptive/generative, i.e.synthetic.

as suggested by Chomsky some two decades ago.

It dispenses, therefore, with the highly abstract representations of the SPE tradition and, above all, the “Vowel Shift Rule" and stress rules therein.

The present model is assumed to capture pertinent generalizations, with no exception, by means of a fairly small set of ordered (morpho) phonological rules which imm:dia- tely apply to the environment bled by suffixation.

But prior to the application of the said assimilation rule, there ought to bo a regularizing rule, one which voices or devoices a root-final coronal, in order to get a geminate.

When this rule is cmhcdded in the assimilation rule as a marked feature, all of the 738 dev erbal nouns in Southern British English can be derived after a degemination rule applies.