DASL Annotation Guidelines

Data and Annotation for Sociolinguistics (DASL)
Annotation Specification: -t/d deletion

For each token, the annotator makes judgements with respect to four factor groups: status of the dependent variable; morphological category; preceding segment and following segment.

Status of the dependent variable

Deleted

-t/d segment has been completely deleted

Retained

-t/d segment is retained. Although a binary division of deleted/retained is usually adequate, in some cases the final -t/d segment is phonetically altered. The segment is often unreleased, glottalized or (less commonly) flapped. All of these variant realizations of -t/d are coded as retained, and the annotator notes the variation in the comments field.

N/A

Because the regular expression query used to generate the list of potential -t/d tokens operates on orthographic transcripts, even with these filters in place some words which are not tokens of -t/d appear in the final list of words to be reviewed. (For instance, based on its orthography, the word 'would' appears to be a possible -t/d token, but is not.) These tokens are labeled N/A and are excluded from the final analysis.

Morphological Category

Monomorphemic

-t/d appears in a word constituting a single morpheme, e.g. 'old'

Irregular/Ambiguous Past Tense

-t/d appears in an irregular past tense verb of semi-weak verbs, which undergo both stem change and -t/d suffixation, e.g. 'told'.. Note: Annotation practices in previous studies have varied with respect to the treatment of irregular verbs. Originally, LDC annotators included all irregular verbs in this category (modals like must, strong verbs like built; the token went). Further annotation excluded must from this category because of its high rate of deletion and high number of tokens in the corpus (n=34); a final round of recoding excluded both must and strong verbs.

Regular Past Tense

-t/d appears in a regular past tense verb, e.g. 'walked'.

Because we were interested in preterit/pronominal distinctions for regular verbs, such cases were noted in the comments field for possible future analysis.

Past -t/d studies have shown that monomorphemes are the most likely category to undergo application of the -t/d deletion rule, whereas regular past-tense forms are most resistant to deletion.

Preceding Segment

The characteristics of the consonant immediately preceding the -t/d token influences the probability of deletion as well. In previous studies, manner of articulation of the preceding segment was shown to be the most relevant constraint, and our study adopts a seven-way distinction. Although some previous studies have adopted a five-way distinction, we chose a finer-grained coding scheme because much of the published -t/d data indicates that preceding /s/ and other alveolar segments favor deletion more strongly than their non-alveolar counterparts, so we chose to code preceding alveolars as separate factors. The seven categories of preceding segment are:

Lateral (/l/)
Rhotic (/r/)
Alveolar Nasal (/n/)
Non-Alveolar Nasal (/m/ or /ng/)
Stop or Affricate (/p, b, k, g/). Cases of preceding affricates were noted in the comments field.
Alveolar Fricative (/s, z/)
Non-Alveolar Fricative (/f, v, th, sh/)

In coding this factor group, the annotator is sometimes faced with a situation in which the preceding segment has been reduced or vocalized. This typically occurs with the liquids /r/ and /l/. If the preceding /l/ segment has been phonetically reduced in this way, the annotator will note this in the comments field, but still indicates the preceding environment as /l/, because the segment is phonemically present although phonetically altered. With vocalized preceding /r/, no evidence of the /r/ remains in the acoustic signal, so the token is coded as N/A, and the annotator notes the vocalized /r/ in the comments field. Less commonly, the annotator might encounter tokens where non-liquid preceding segments have been deleted (e.g., government being rendered as "governme_t"). As with vocalized preceding /r/, such cases are coded as N/A, with appropriate commentary.

Following environment

This refers to which segment, if any, follows the -t/d token. Past studies of -t/d deletion have consistently demonstrated that following consonants favor deletion, while following vowels inhibit deletion. Among the consonants, glides and liquids favor deletion less than obstruents. The effect of following pause has been shown to be variable based on geographic region. We have adopted a seven-way distinction for following segment:

obstruents (stops, fricatives and nasals)
lateral (/l/)
rhotic (/r/)
clustering glides (w+unrounded V, y+u)
non-clustering glides (w+rounded vowel, y elsewhere)
vowel
pause (silence follows -t/d segment). Following pause usually occurrs sentence-finally. In other cases, the annotator would indicate following pause if the speaker had a significant (LENGTH??) break in the flow of speech, usually to take a breath, etc.

In coding following segments, annotators occasionally encounter cases where the segment has been entirely deleted. This happens most frequently with /h/, particularly when the following word is an unstressed pronoun (her, his). In such cases, the annotator codes the following segment as a vowel, since the segment has been completely deleted, and makes a note in the comments field.