In phonetics and phonology, an intervocalic consonant is a consonant that occurs between two vowels. Intervocalic consonants are often associated with lenition, a phonetic process that causes consonants to weaken and eventually disappear entirely. An example of such a change in English is intervocalic alveolar flapping, a process (especially in North American and Australian English) that, impressionistically speaking, replaces /t/ with /d/. For example, "metal" is pronounced ; "batter" sounds like . (More precisely, both /t/ and /d/ are pronounced as the alveolar tap .) In North American English, the weakening is variable across word boundaries, such that the /t/ of "see you tomorrow" might be pronounced as either or . Some languages have intervocalic-weakening processes fully active word-internally and in connected discourse. For example, in Spanish, /d/ is regularly pronounced like in the words "todo" (meaning "all") and "la duna ", meaning "the dune" (but if the word is pronounced alone).
References
- ^ Nathan, Geoffrey S. (2008). Phonology: A cognitive grammar introduction. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ISBN 978-90-272-1907-7.
 | This phonology article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it. |