Double consonants in English: Graphemic, morphological, prosodic and etymological determinants

, ) have a double consonant (86%). This resonates well with Evertz & Primus (2013) who attribute a special theoretical status to this structure (which they call the ‘canonical trochee’ – a bisyllabic graphemic word with in the second syllable).

It follows that there are indeed patterns (in the sense of recurring word endings) which correlate with the presence or absence of double consonants. Note that the graphemic form of the word ending is the determinant, not the phonological form. For the phonological word ending [ɨk] for example, there are at least three different spellings, , , and . While predominantly occurs with preceding single consonants, and occur exclusively with double consonants. The following table lists this and similar cases:

phonological word ending	graphemic word ending			%	example
ɨk 7 19 27%
		3	20	14%	panic
		4	0	100%	derrick
		13	0	100%	haddock
ɨl
		6	0	100%	barrel
		0	3	0%	moral
		0	2	0%	beryl
		0	2	0%	peril
ɨt
		51	6	89%	cricket
		0	6	0%	palate
		2	14	13%	edit
		6	2	75%	maggot
ər
		93	3	91%	hammer
		8	3	73%	collar
		6	3	67%	horror
		1	6	14%	honour
əʊ
		33	2	94%	sorrow
		14	6	70%	motto
		0	2	0%	depot
		0	3	0%	plateau
ɨs
		3	0	100%	cirrus
		3	0	100%	callous
		2	4	33%	menace
		4	1	80%	tennis
		0	3	0%	promise
		3	4	43%	malice

Table 4: Homophonous word endings which differ graphemically, and which show a different amount of consonant doubling depending on the graphemic form of the word ending.

For the speller, this is an unfortunate situation: To deduce whether or not a consonant is doubled, she must know which of many possible written forms a phonological word ending has. In this respect, the written forms are doubly coded. This correlation can be termed graphemic harmony: One choice of graphemic options determines another choice.

At least partly, graphemic harmony correlates with the words’ etymology: Words of French origin, for example, tend to have single consonants (e.g. , , , for /əʊ/, , , , ); words of Germanic origin tend to have double consonants (e.g. , , , ). One notable exception is ; the respective words are mostly of French origin, but occur mostly with doubled consonants.

4.3. The reading of single intervocalic consonant letters

The third analysis takes the reader’s perspective. To understand the patterning of consonant doubling and word endings (table 3 above), it is important to understand the ‘functional load’ for each word ending. For example, as shown above, words which end with are only rarely spelled with a preceding double consonant. But if -words never contained long/diphthong vowel phonemes, the marking of vowel quality would be negligible. If, on the other hand, a significant fraction of words contained long/diphthong vowel phonemes, the graphemic forms would be a lot more idiosyncratic – the reader would just have to know how to pronounce this particular -word, as opposed to a rule for the set of all -words.

The data base to tackle this question is the set of all words in CELEX that meet the following requirements:

• 
  the word is not annotated as morphologically complex in CELEX (remaining morphologically complex formations on free bases are manually filtered)
  
• 
  the word is graphemically bisyllabic (), or trisyllabic with single final (
  )
  
• 
  the word contains one single intervocalic consonant letter between the first and the second syllable (mit>/*