Gestural coordination and the distribution of English 'geminates'

Recent work has argued that phonology includes grammatical principles and representations that refer to the temporal coordination of gestures (Gafos 2001, 2002). In this paper, we extend this line of work by arguing that the distribution of phonetically long consonants in English derives from general principles of gestural organization. In English, clusters of homorganic consonants are attested at morpheme junctures inter-vocalically but not at word edges. This is shown in (1-3).

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