Date: Tue, 7 Mar 1995 19:18:00 EST From: "Dennis.Preston" <22709MGR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.EDU> Subject: Re: VBE and 60 Minutes I am puzzled why naturalness is not a good argument for the reduction of consonant clusters. The suggestion that there would be none left simply ignores another natural process - the formation of clusters (from, for example, the loss of reduced and/or unstressed vowels). That natural processes might counteract one another seems to be fairly well-established, historically and in current micro-variation studies. Dennis Preston