Ghost segments in the Flemish Tussentaal

The Flemish informal standard (Tussentaal) exhibits a word-final elision process whereby words such as ‘wat’ and ‘met’ are realised without their final plosive: [BA] and [mE]. This elided segment triggers devoicing in following fricatives. This process is not derivable from phonological context alone, and the current literature has not explained its distribution. This study therefore set off to (1) document this elision process, and (2) account for its distribution.
Using Python and the corpus engine OpenSonar, audio tokens of the fifty most common Dutch words containing final coronal plosives were scraped from the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands. Joint results of an algorithmic and a manual analysis reveal that this elision occurs in the present tense marker /-t/ and most function words. All exceptions found have historically undergone word-final schwa deletion, suggesting that final coronal plosive elision may be older. Evidence from 13th century texts supports this claim.