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Empirical evidence for laryngeal features: Aspirating vs. true voice languages1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 January 2013

JILL BECKMAN ,
MICHAEL JESSEN  and
CATHERINE RINGEN
JILL BECKMAN*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
MICHAEL JESSEN*
Affiliation:
Bundeskriminalamt
CATHERINE RINGEN*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
*
(Beckman) Authors' addresses: Department of Linguistics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA[email protected]
(Jessen) Bundeskriminalamt Sprecher-Erkennung und Tonträgeranalyse, KT54, D-65173 Wiesbaden, Germany[email protected]
(Ringen) Department of Linguistics, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA[email protected]
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Abstract

It is well known that German utterance-initial lenis stops are voiceless but that German intervocalic (or intersonorant) lenis stops are sometimes produced with voicing. This variable voicing can be understood as passive voicing, voicing that results because of the voiced context, rather than from active voicing gestures by speakers. Thus, speakers are not actively aiming to voice intervocalic stops, just as they are not actively aiming to voice utterance-initial stops (Jessen & Ringen 2002, Jessen 2004). If this is correct, the variable voicing that occurs in aspirating languages should be different from the voicing that occurs in true voice languages (such as Russian), in which speakers are actively aiming to voice both initial and intervocalic lenis stops. Since there is little data on the relative amount of intervocalic voicing in true voice languages, however, it has been difficult to evaluate this prediction. The purpose of this paper is to compare data on the voicing of intervocalic stops in German and English with data on the voicing of intervocalic stops in true voice languages. We find that the differences are substantial, supporting the claim that aspirating languages are not like true voice languages, in which the feature of contrast is [voice].

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , July 2013 , pp. 259 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[1]

We have benefitted from comments from the audiences at the 2010 Berkeley Germanic Linguistics Round Table, the 18th and 20th Manchester Phonology Meetings, the Departments of Linguistics at the University of Salzburg, Austria, the University of Iowa, and the Department of Experimental Phonetics, University of Stuttgart, Germany, where portions of earlier versions of this paper were presented. All the spectrograms of Russian are from data collected in St. Petersburg and reported on in Ringen & Kulikov (2012). Our thanks to Pétur Helgason, Vladimir Kulikov, Kari Suomi and two Journal of Linguistics reviewers whose comments have caused revisions that we feel make improvements in this paper. The research of C. Ringen was supported, in part, by a Global Scholar Award from the University of Iowa and an NSF award (BCS00742338). Authors' names are listed in alphabetical order.

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