Gemination and Degemination in English Prefixaton

Ingo Plag (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)
Gemination and Degemination in English Prefixaton

In English, affixation may lead to the adjacency of two identical consonants across a morpheme boundary (e.g. un#necessary). The standard view of what happens in the case of un- and in- is that un- geminates (i.e. is pronounced with a long nasal), while in- displays degemination (i.e. is pronounced as if it had only one nasal, not two). I will present the first systematic empirical study of this phenomenon based on conversational speech. It turns out that in- may also geminate, contra to the unanimously expressed opinion in the literature. This finding has important theoretical and methodological implications, which I will discuss.