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

, , , , ), and no before these suffixes corresponds to a short vowel. In this sense, is special (cf. e.g. Cummings 1988). It is conceivable that similar sub-patterns exist that can explain some – though far from all – variation in table 6.

Like in the last section, we can classify these endings: Those in (23a) are clearly associated with a long/diphthong reading of the respective vowel, those in (23b) are clearly associated with a short reading; those in (23c) are in between.

(23) a. >80% /VV/: <-us>, <-a>, <-er>, <-um>, <-o>, <-ent>, <-ey>

b. >80% /V/: <-it>, <-et>, <-ic>, <-ish>, <-age>
c. 20-80% /V/: <-ar>, <-al>, <-y>, <-i>, <-ile>, <-our>, <-on>, <-ate>, <-id>, <-or>

4.4 Synopsis

Many of the word endings in (23) are in the same group as in (22); there seems to be a connection. Functionally, this makes sense: If a short vowel is often encoded with consonant doubling (e.g. , group 22a above), then a single consonant letter can correspond to a long/diphthong vowel phoneme (e.g.

, group 23a). If, on the other hand, a short vowel phoneme is often encoded with a single consonant letter (e.g. , group 22a), then the same structure should not be used to encode long/diphthong vowels.

Figure 1 shows this connection. For each word ending from (22) and (23) above, the amount of consonant doubling (horizontal axis) is plotted against the amount of a long/diphthong reading in words with a single intervocalic consonant letter (vertical axis). So for example, -age in the middle of the bottom of figure 1 indicates with its position that it occurs with consonant doubling 47% of the time (e.g. , ), while at the same time a short vowel reading is dominant (92%) in <…VCage> words (e.g. , ).

%/VV/

%



Figure 1: Percentage of spellings (as a ratio of combined and spellings) for each word ending combined with the percentage of /VV/ (long vowel or diphthong) reading for single vowel letters in words with that suffix.

These results have to be taken with a grain of salt because the actual numbers are sometimes rather small. For example, occurs only three times with a short vowel in the corpus; one of the words is spelled with a single consonant (), two are spelled with a doubled consonant (,

). This leads to a 67% ratio of spellings, but it should clear that this figure is of a different quality than e.g. the 19 instances of .

With that in mind, we can identify four groups of word endings in figure 1:

Group 1: no consonant doubling, no long/diphthong reading (<-id>, <-ic>, <-ish>, <-it>; lower left corner of figure 1). This relation is functional, as sketched above: If words that end with are never read as having a long/diphthong vowel phoneme, the shortness of the vowel in turn does not have to be indicated.

Group 2: mostly consonant doubling, mostly long/diphthong reading (<-us>, <-a>, <-er>, <-le>, <-ey>; with limitations also <-um>, <-ent>, <-ar>, <-or>, <-o>, <y>; upper right corner of figure 1). This relation is also (mostly) functional: If vowels preceding single consonant letters are likely to be read as long/diphthong vowel phonemes (e.g.

), then the shortness of the vowel phoneme should in turn be indicated (e.g. ). However, there are some idiosyncratic cases (e.g. vs. ).

Group 3: some amount of consonant doubling, some amount of long/diphthong reading (<ate>, <our>, <al>, <i>, <ile>, <on>, <-ot>; in between groups 1 and 2, towards the center of figure 1). These word endings do not systematically encode shortness, even though a considerable amount of words with a single intervocalic consonant letter gets a long/diphthong reading; shortness is “under-coded”, so to speak. In effect, this group shows a greater amount of idiosyncratic words. This leads to problems for the reader (consider the long/short pairs /; /; /), but also for the speller (consider the single/double consonant pairs /; /).

Group 4: some amount of consonant doubling, no long/diphthong reading (<-in>, <-et>, <-ow>, <-ock>; with limitations <age>; bottom right of figure 1). These word endings systematically encode shortness by consonant doubling, and they do so even without a functional need: Vowels before single intervocalic consonant letters hardly ever correspond to long/diphthong vowels. In a way, this group “over-codes” shortness.¹⁴

Note that we do not find word endings in the upper left corner. The respective spellings would be highly idiosyncratic.

So what is the condition for consonant doubling in monomorphemic words? Obviously, word endings have a strong effect (although only the most frequent ones are accounted for in figure 1): Some endings are correlated with consonant doubling, some with single consonants, and some are in between. If we take figure 1 as a basis, we can at least formulate a sufficient condition for doubling: Consonant doubling occurs with word endings that are also associated with a long/diphthong reading. This condition is not necessary: Group 4 also contains double consonants, even though there is no functional pressure.

5. Conclusion

Consonant doubling is regular in morphologically complex words. It can be motivated with reference to e-deletion before vocalic suffixes, and for morphologically complex words it can possibly be described in graphemic and morphological terms alone, without reference to phonology. Of course, the resulting spellings are also phonographically plausible, and there are regular correspondences on a suprasegmental level (cf. e.g. Rollings 2004, Evertz & Primus 2013). Phonological terms are, however, not necessary to capture the graphemic behavior of morphologically complex words.

Consonant doubling is far less regular in morphologically simple words, where a short vowel phoneme is a necessary condition. Doubling in these words varies with the respective word’s ending. Some word endings trigger consonant doubling (e.g. <-er>, <-a>, <-y>, <-ow>, <-ock>), some do not (e.g. <-it>, <-id>, <-ic>). This is an effect of the graphemic form of the word ending, not one of the phonological form. As a matter of fact, the same phonological ending (e.g. [ɨk]) can be spelled in different ways, and the presence of consonant doubling hinges on the choice of this spelling (cf. e.g. /). This phenomenon was dubbed graphemic harmony. Word endings are thus recurring entities with distributional properties – they correlate with consonant doubling or non-doubling. That makes them very similar to suffixes. But unlike suffixes, they have no morphosyntactic or semantic function. It is an interesting question whether they are psychologically “real”. Do proficient readers strip them off the word just like they do with suffixes (cf. e.g. Rastle, Davis & New, 2004)?

There is a functional relation between consonant doubling and the amount of words with single intervocalic consonants that correspond to words with long/diphthong vowel phonemes: Doubling is only necessary if the alternative spelling would be prone to misreading. The systematic occurrence of words like

makes the spelling (not *) necessary.

References

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Berg, K., Buchmann, F., Dybiec, K, and Fuhrhop, N. (2014). Morphological spellings in English. Written Language and Literacy 14.2, 282-307.

Bolinger, D. (1986). Intonation and its parts: melody in spoken English. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bolinger, D. (1989). Intonation and its uses : melody in grammar and discourse. London: Arnold.

Brame, M. K. (1983a). Ungrammatical Notes, 2: Doubling trouble and the peccable British. Linguistic Analysis 12(1), pp. 85-89.

Brame, M. K. (1983b). Ungrammatical Notes, 3: Undoubling and the impeccable British. Linguistic Analysis 12(2), pp. 173-182.

Carney, E. (1994). A Survey of English Spelling. New York: Routledge.

Cummings, D.W. (1988). American English Spelling: An informal description. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Evertz, M. & Primus, B. (2013). The graphematic foot in English and German. Writing Systems Research, 5(1), 1-23.

Fudge, E. (1984). English Word Stress. London: Allen & Unwin.

Halle, M. & Mohanan K. P. (1985). Segmental phonology of modern English. Linguistic inquiry (1985): 57-116.

Jespersen, O. ([1909] 1928). A modern English grammar on historical principles, Part I: Sounds and Spellings. Heidelberg: Winter.

Jones, D., Roach, P, Setter, J., & Esling, J. (¹⁸2011). Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Palmer, F., Huddleston, R., & Pullum, G. K. (2002). Inflectional morphology and related matters. In: Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G. K. (Eds.), The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1565-1620.

Rastle, K., Davis, M., & New, B. (2004). "The broth in my brother’s brothel: Morpho-orthographic segmentation in visual word recognition." Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11.6, 1090-1098.

Rollings, A. (2004). The Spelling Patterns of English. Munich: Lincom.

Taft, M. (1979). Lexical access-via an orthographic code: The basic orthographic syllabic structure (BOSS). In: Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 18.1, 21-39.

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1^ Graphotactic regularities are the written analog to phonotactic regularities in spoken language. They pertain to the written side of words alone and capture the combinatorial principles of letters and graphemes. For example, the fact that is, unlike most other letters, never doubled is an instance of a graphotactic regularity. It cannot be explained by reference to any other linguistic level.

2^ Phonographic regularities describe the relation between units of writing and units of sound. The standard case are phoneme-grapheme-correspondences, i.e. the relation between phonemes and graphemes. The grapheme , for example, regularly corresponds to the phoneme /m/.

3^ In this paper, I will use British English as a point of reference. Following Jones et al. (¹⁸2011), the vowels [ɪ], [æ], [ʊ], [ɒ], [ʌ] and [e] will be referred to as short. The debate around short vs. long (e.g. Jones et al. ¹⁸2011), tense vs. lax (e.g. Halle & Mohanan 1985), free vs. checked (e.g. Kurath 1964) vowels, how to define these categories, and which category is the most suitable phonologically or phonographically, will be ignored here. As Cummings (1988: 53f.) demonstrates, at least the tense vs. lax contrast is rooted in spelling. This highlights the crucial importance of keeping the representational levels apart analytically: If lax vowels are defined phonographically, i.e. as those phonemes that correspond to written vowels in graphemically closed syllables (as e.g. it>, inner>,
udding>), and we use this category to describe phonographic correspondences (e.g. as in ‘vowel letters before double consonants correspond to lax vowel phonemes’), we end up with a perfectly tautological statement.

4^ Written and spoken words and segments are distinguished as follows: Written words and parts of words are presented in angled brackets (e.g. ); spoken words and parts of words are presented in square brackets (e.g. [wəːd]). If the medial realization is irrelevant, the word or part of word is italicized (e.g. word).

5^ Additionally, , , and have a distribution very similar to that of double consonants; Venezky (1999: 14 et passim) calls them ‘pseudogeminates’. Synchronically, can be argued to be the doubled variant of , cf. e.g.
-
- *
.

6^ The condition for their distribution seems to be the stem-final phoneme: <el> appears “after v, th, ch, n, as in hovel, brothel, hatchel, kernel” (OED).

7^ This only holds for British English; in American English, the vowels in staff and class are short.

8^ Note that in most cases involving -ed, the suffix is phonologically a single consonant (/t/ or /d/), and the inflected form has the same number of syllables as the base. So phonographically, would be a good spelling for /bænd/. Yet the suffix is graphemically vowel-intial, and thus the requirement in (5) holds, which leads to consonant doubling. This is further evidence for the graphemic nature of consonant doubling. It also serves to give the suffix a distinct (and almost unique) graphemic form (cf. Berg et al. 2014).

9^ As Bolinger (1986: 351 N.3) puts it: “Normally, syllables after the stress behave intonationally the same regardless of whether they are full or reduced. The pitch contour is the same in both máypole and máple […]”.

Generally, dictionaries of American English tend to indicate post-primary secondary stress in compounds (e.g. Webster’s Third), while dictionaries of British English do not (e.g. OED).

10^ The term word ending is used in the following to describe recurring letter strings. In bisyllabic words, the word ending is the part of the word starting with the vowel (letter or phoneme) of the second syllable (e.g. in or in . It is the reverse unit to Taft’s (1979) BOSS: If you subtract the BOSS from a word, the remainder is the word ending.

11^ This excludes the consonant phonemes /ð, θ, ŋ, ʃ, ʒ, v, z/, which all correspond to complex graphemes that have no doubled equivalent (*, *). Moreover, the following non-doubled complex graphemes are also taken into account: (as a doubled variant of or ), (as a doubled variant of if it corresponds to /d͡ʒ/, cf. e.g. Venezky 1999: 14), and (as a doubled variant of if it corresponds to /t͡ʃ/, cf. e.g. Venezky 1999: 14). /z/ can correspond to , which can be doubled (e.g. ); however, is rather marginal and limited to recent borrowings (cf. Venezky 1999: 45). The doubled variant for /v/ () is marginal as well.

12^ This excludes the consonant letters . In words with these letters, there is no potential opposition (as in e.g. /). Thus, intervocalic (for example) cannot code vowel quality, and both a short and a long/diphthong reading are possible for structurally similar words (cf. /).

13^ As noted above, vowel letter clusters in the first syllable usually correspond to long or diphthong vowel phonemes; the word ending has little effect on it.

14^ With the exception of group 4, the relation between the two dimensions could also be interpreted as being linear. However, to my mind it makes more sense to think of the distribution in terms of cluster and outliers/inbetweeners.