# Other allomorphic alternations in English (i) regular past tense verb suffixes allomorph past tense morpheme [d] ‘played’ ‘-ed’ [t] ‘finished’ [ɪd] ‘wanted’ ← [ɪ] insertion (ii) regular plural noun suffixes plural morpheme [s] ‘cats’ ‘-s’ [z] ‘dogs’ [ɪz] ‘dishes’ ← [ɪ] insertion ⇒ The assimilatory situation is at work only across morpheme boundaries. But several other processes(epenthesis, deletion, metathesis) can be involved to show morphophonemic alternations. ♣ Answer the questions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in Exercises on page 53-58.

3. English Consonants 3.1 Stops (1) Devoicing of voiced stops English voiced stops /b, d, g/ will be fully voiced in the intervocalic position: aboard, adore, eager. In initial and final positions, /b, d, g/ are partially voiced, as follows: (a) bay (b) cab (c)bib day sad did gay sag gig (i) Devoicing in these positions is not total, and partially devoiced, not voiceless. (ii) Final devoicing is greater than initial devoicing. (ⅲ) If there is a voiced sound immediately after, devoicing does not take place: in dog-meal, /g/ is not devoiced, while in dog-food, /g/ is devoiced.

(2) Aspiration The voiceless stops /p, t, k/ is pronounced with aspiration at the beginning of stressed syllables: pay[phe], take[thek], cab[khæb], apart[əphart], attack[əthæk], occur[əkhɝ]. - Weak Aspiration: (a) in an unstressed syllable: polite[pəláɪt], vacuum[vǽkjum] → unaspirated (b) before a syllabic consonant: pickle[pɪkl] → unaspirated (c) if released in final position: sit[sɪt], sick[sɪk] → weak released - Unreleased stops: Syllable-final single coda stops are unreleased. mop[pㄱ], sit[tㄱ], sack[kㄱ], mob[bㄱ], sad[dㄱ], bag[gㄱ] - When it is not following a vowel, most speakers release the final /t/: fast[t]. (3) Unrelease When a word is with two non-homorganic stops in a row, there is no audible release for the first stop: sipped [pㄱ+t], cheap date [pㄱ+d], sobbed [bㄱ+d]

(4) One prolonged closure for stop + homorganic stop sequences: big girl, black cat, sad dog, top block, white dog, . . [g:] [k:] [d:] [b:] [d:] An assimilatory situation arises when a non-alveolar stop is preceded by an alveolar stop: night cap [naɪt kæp] → [naɪk:æp], white paper [waɪt pepɚ] → [waɪp:epɚ] red badge [rɛd bæʤ] → [rɛb:æʤ] : alveolar stops /t, d/ become bilabial [p, b] or velar [k, g] respectively, because of the following bilabial/velar stops, while maintaining the original voicing. (5) nasal release: The stop closure is maintained and nasally released in the sequence of stop + homorganic nasal. (a) syllabic nasal: button[-tn], sudden[-dn], taken[-kŋ] (b) nasal plosion in the initial position of the following syllable of the word: submarine/b+m/ → [m:], madness/d+n/ → [n:] (c) nasal release in the initial position of the next word: sad news/d+n/→ [n:]