Gemination and degemination in English affixation

In English, phonological double consonants only occur across morphological boundaries, for example, in affixation (e.g. in unnatural, innumerous). There are two possibilities for the phonetic realization of these morphological geminates: Either the phonological double is realized with a longer duration than a phonological singleton (gemination), or it is of the same duration as a singleton consonant (degemination). The present book provides the first large-scale empirical study on the gemination with the five English affixes un-, locative in-, negative in-, dis- and -ly. Using corpus and experimental data, the predictions of various approaches to the morpho-phonological and the morpho-phonetic interface are tested. By finding out which approach can account best for the gemination pattern of English affixed words, important implications about the interplay between morphology, phonology and phonetics are drawn.

Sonia Ben Hedia studied English and history at the University of Siegen from 2008 till 2013. In her undergraduate studies she mainly focused on second language acquisition. After earning her degree, she started as a research assistant at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and worked in the DFG Research Unit FOR2375 'Spoken Morphology'. Her research is characterized by a cross-disciplinary approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies to investigate the interplay between morphology, phonology and phonetics. She completed her PhD on morphological gemination in English 2018, and currently holds a post-doc position at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.