Final coronal stop deletion (CSD) in English – seen in alternations such as wes(t) side, ol(d) man – is one of the most-studied phenomena in the field of language variation and change. Previous research has revealed several significant constraints on this process including morphology, following phonological context, and lexical identity (Guy, 1980, 1991; Labov, 1989; Neu, 1980; Santa Ana, 1996). We have conducted a largescale analysis of this variable in early New Zealand English, incorporating several factors into our model that have not previously been investigated, (e.g., lexical frequency, speech rate), which serve to address issues of grammar and representation. Using both acoustic and auditory cues, we classified over 4000 tokens of underlying t/d as either present or absent. These tokens were drawn from 19 speakers of early New Zealand English. We fit a logistic regression model to the data by hand. The Wald Statistics for the resulting model are shown in Table 1. As the focus of this paper is on linguistic constraints on CSD, we include speaker identity in our model, so as to hold social factors constant.
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