A Stratal Approach to English Affricates

Abstract

There is a general consensus in the phonological literature that the English affricates /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ are unitary segments rather than clusters of a stop and a fricative. However, for /tʃ/, not all the evidence is consistent with this approach. While /tʃ/ patterns as a single segment in linguistic performance, some authors on British pronunciation have pointed out that glottalization targets /tʃ/ as if it were a cluster (Higginbottom 1964; Gimson and Cruttenden 2001). This paper proposes that the conflicting evidence can be resolved under a stratal model (Bermúdez-Otero 2018a). We argue that /tʃ/, in the relevant dialects, is a cluster at the stem level but surfaces as a monosegmental affricate in the course of the derivation. The behaviour of /dʒ/, on the other hand, suggests that it is a single segment at all levels of representation.