ABSTRACT
As a postgraduate UCL student in the Department of Phonetics, as it then was, I had the pleasure of attending lectures given by J. D. O’Connor (Doc) on a wide variety of topics. Though I remember with gratitude all my teachers of those years, and recall many of their academic dicta, the one thing I retain, in addition, of Doc’s sayings is his favourite expression at that time, at any rate, which he repeated several times in each lecture. I registered the expression as ‘a tenny rate’, so Doc must have produced the /t/ with the degree of affrication/aspiration appropriate to the context of initial in a stressed syllable. Furthermore, I must have found this pronunciation sufficiently unusual for it to have struck me at the time as amusing, and for me to have remembered it for more years than either Doc or I would care to count. The process whereby a consonant or more than one consonant at the end of one word is transferred in connected speech to the beginning of the next word if it has a vowel onset, has many wider implications, and I would like to consider some of them here. I shall use the customary term ‘consonant capture’ to refer to that process.
