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A prosodic theory of laryngeal contrasts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2005

Wolfgang Kehrein  and
Chris Golston
Wolfgang Kehrein
Affiliation:
Philipps University Marburg
Chris Golston
Affiliation:
California State University Fresno
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Abstract

Current models of laryngeal licensing allow as many laryngeal contrasts within a syllable as there are segments, at least in principle. We show here that natural languages are much more economical in their use of laryngeal contrasts than segmental models would lead us to expect. Specifically, we show that voicing, aspiration and glottalisation occur at most once per onset, nucleus or coda in a given language, and that the order in which they are produced within onset, nucleus and coda is never contrastive. To account for these restrictions, we propose that laryngeal features are properties not of segments, but of the onsets, nuclei and codas that dominate them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , December 2004 , pp. 325 - 357
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We thank Kristján Árnason, G. A. Broadwell, Gene Buckley, Marika Butskhrikidze, Ioana Chitoran, Anne Cutler, Steve Egesdal, Sean Fulop, Michael Job, Peter Ladefoged, Ian Maddieson, Johanna Nichols, Martha Ratliff, Joe Salmons, Ela Thurgood, Graham Thurgood, Ray Weitzman, Richard Wiese and Richard Wright for their help. Thanks also to audiences at the Universities of Düsseldorf and Marburg, HILP IV in Leiden and LSA in Los Angeles for useful comments and discussion and to the editors, associate editor and reviewers of Phonology for their careful input. None of them is responsible for infelicities and inaccuracies.