This paper focuses on heterosyllabic homorganic NC clusters in English to explain why only a coronal nasal and voiceless stop sequence undergoes postnasal deletion resulting in two different output forms for the input /nt/. We ascribe it to a specified *NC̥ -CORONAL and the faithful realization of [n] of /nt/ is due to MAX-IO(NAS) and MAX-IO(OBS). We argue that this aberrant looking optional /t/ deletion in the heterosyllabic /nt/ in English is not an exceptional case of deletion of a cross-linguistic tendency, where C1 is the usual target of deletion in a C1C2 sequence over a syllable boundary or the asymmetry between onset and coda; it is a natural process where C2, the onset element of the following syllable, can be the target of phonological processes when the preservation of the onset constituent is suppressed by a higher ranked segmental faithfulness constraint such as MAX-IO(NAS).
1. Introduction
2. Data
3. Previsous Analyses of Postnasal /t/ Deletion
4. A Constraint-based Analysis
5. Conclusion