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

ppy>); this consonant letter could in principle be doubled¹².

the first syllable contains a single vowel letter (imit>/*ailor>)¹³

This leads to a corpus of 1,114 words. Classifying for short (‘/V’/) or long/diphthong (‘/VV/’) vowel phonemes (according to CELEX’s classification system), we get the following distribution:

	/V/	/VV/	total
trochaic	318	440	758
iambic	297	59	356
total	615	499	1,114

Table 5: Cross-classification of vowel quality (‘/V/’: short; ‘/VV/’: long/diphthong) over foot structure (iamb/trochee). Data base: all graphemically bisyllabic words (and trisyllabic words with single final ) in CELEX with a single vowel letter in the first syllable followed by a single consonant letter.

As table 5 shows, phonological foot structure co-varies with vowel quality: If -words correspond to trochaic phonological forms, the vowel phoneme is a long vowel or diphthong 58% of the time, e.g. . If they correspond to iambic words, the vowel phoneme is short (and often reduced) 83% of the time, e.g. .

The correspondence of a given graphemic words to an iambic or trochaic phonological word depends on many factors, e.g. the presence or absence of prefixes like or (e.g. , ) and the word category (e.g. pro’test (V) vs. ‘protest (N)). In the following, we will only investigate the 758 trochaic words from table 5.

For these words, we get the following distribution according to their word ending (only word endings with ten or more occurences):

word ending	/V/	/VV/	total	%/V/	examples
us	0	27	27	0%	opus, bonus
a	3	38	41	7%	drama, schema
um	1	11	12	8%	velum, datum
er	3	25	28	11%	paper, cater
ent	2	12	14	14%	silent, latent
ey	2	12	14	14%	crikey, phoney
o	6	26	32	19%	zero, lino
or	3	11	14	21%	manor, minor
ar	3	8	11	27%	radar, vicar
al	3	8	11	27%	oral, coral
y	13	27	40	33%	lady, many
i	5	10	15	33%	yogi, mini
ile	5	7	12	42%	senile, fragile
our	6	6	12	50%	vapour, glamour
on	13	9	22	59%	melon, demon
ate	6	4	10	60%	senate, climate
id	16	5	21	76%	solid, stupid
it	16	3	19	84%	limit, vomit
et	9	1	10	90%	planet, comet
ic	21	2	23	91%	comic, logic
age	11	1	12	92%	manage, damage
ish	11	1	12	92%	vanish, fetish

Table 6: Reading of words with single intervocalic consonant letters as containing short or long/diphthong vowel phonemes, according to word ending. All word endings that occur 10 times or more in the sub-corpus.

An in-depth analysis of the word lists that serves as the basis of table 6 may lead to interesting – and potentially clearer – results. For example, almost all words with <-ic>, <-id>, and <-it> that correspond to long vowels involve (e.g.