DISAMBIGUATING THE DENTALISATION TAG ON PRE-DENTAL /T/ DELETION IN L2 ENGLISH
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61307/gjl.v13i1.635Keywords:
Pre-dental /t/, dentalisation, dentalised /t/, pre-dental environment, /t/ deletionAbstract
While the phenomenon is described as /t/ deletion in some linguistic environments, its occurrence before the dental fricatives has been labelled dentalisation. This suggests that /t/ invariably acquires dental features when it occurs before a dental sound in a cluster. This assumption for pedagogy implies that learners of English are likely to get confused over a dentalised variant of pre-dental /t/ at the phonetic input. To dogmatically retain this description implies that just as the alveolar /n/ is realised as [ŋ] and /m/ before velar and labial sounds, there should be a dental variant of /t/ before a dental sound in clusters. This work examined the dentalised(/t/) in predentalised contexts. It was found that the speakers deleted pre-dental /t/, thus, indicating that /t/ has no dentalised variants but gets deleted in the pre-dental environment. We suggested imposing the term dentalisation on pre-dental /t/ should be reviewed in non-native environments.
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