Dissertation - Michael Becker

Of the 3002 nouns in TELL whose bare stem ends in a voiceless stop, almost 90% arepoly-syllabic, and in most of those, the final stop alternates 1 (19). The rate of alternation ismuch lower for monosyllables, especially in those with a simplex coda.(19) Size n % alternatingMonosyllabic, simplex coda (CVC) 137 11.7%Monosyllabic, complex coda (CVCC) 164 25.9%Polysyllabic (CVCVC and bigger) 2701 58.9%The distribution of alternating stops also varies by the place of articulation of the wordfinalstop (20). Most word-final labials, palatals and dorsals 2 do alternate, but only a smallproportion of the final coronals do.(20) Place n % alternatingLabial (p) 294 84.0%Coronal (t) 1255 17.1%Palatal (Ù) 191 60.5%Dorsal (k) 1262 84.9%While longer words correlate with a higher proportion of alternating nouns, size doesnot affect all places equally (21). In all places, CVC words alternate less than CVCVCwords, but the behavior of CVCC words is not uniform. For labials and palatals, a majorityof CVCC words alternate, patterning with the CVCVC words. For the dorsals, the CVCCwords pattern together with the shorter CVC words, showing a modest proportion of1 Some nouns in TELL are listed as both alternators and non-alternators. In calculating the percentageof alternating nouns, such nouns were counted as half alternators (although in reality it’s entirely possiblethat the actual rate of alternation is different from 50%). Therefore, the proportion of alternating nouns iscalculated by adding the number of alternating nouns and half the number of vacillating nouns, and dividingthe sum by the total number of nouns.2 Dorsals delete post-vocalically, see §2.4.6 for discussion.24