Exploring the intersection of two linguistic variables in British English dialects

The bulk of sociolinguistic research has focused on covariation between linguistic variables and social factors e.g. when a phonological variable is involved in covariation with social variables or other linguistic variables (Trudgill 1974). Recent research, however, note that little attention has been devoted to how multiple linguistic variables are interrelated in a given speech community (Guy, Hinskens 2016). Along this line, this paper investigates the covariation of two linguistic variables which intersect in British English: (t)-deletion and (t)-glottaling in the C(C)t linguistic context (e.g. want, kept). Data was gathered from 36 participants by means of sociolinguistic interviews, reading passages, and word lists in three British speech communities. 1,275 tokens were gathered. Data was transcribed in ELAN, with support from visual cues in the spectrogram in PRAAT, and mixed-effects logistic regression analyses was carried out. Results show that less sonorous preceding segments favour (t)-deletion, whereas more sonorous ones favour (t)-glottaling. The preceding and following phonological environments, syllable stress, style, and sex of participants were also found to play a significant role.