Word final and intervocalic glottalised /t/ replacement in Estuary English: Variety of Essex

Carvajal, Camilo Andrés B. 2016. Word final and intervocalic glottalised /t/ replacement in Estuary English: Variety of Essex. Linguistic Research 33(2), 193-204. The realisation of /t/ as a glottal stop [ʔ] is a phenomenon described as occurring in word medial or final position (Docherty, 2010; Fabricius, 2002; Przedlacka, 2002; Roach, 1973). In English, sociolinguistic studies and phonological corpora (Schleef, 2013; Tagliamonte & Temple, 2005) have tried to frame and predict the context of glottal stops, since it is perceived as a phenomenon of change which is an index of membership to the Cockney or Estuary English, different from the variety of London. We explored a set of tokens containing glottalisation of the alveolar stop segment /t/ from a recorded corpus of naturally occurring data (British reality TV show The Only Way is Essex) in order to predict instances of glottal replacement. Main findings suggest that both onset or coda position are insufficient variables to determine the occurrence of [ʔ], but stress does allow a better calculation for contexts of glottalisation replacement. The present analysis expands prior findings in the literature by involving syllabic boundaries and stress to determine the maintenance of the alveolar feature in all studied samples, as well as to support former predictions that glottalised /t/ emerges in syllable final or intervocalic contexts relying on pure articulatory grounds. (University of Delaware)