This paper presents an acoustic study of coarticulation of Argentine Danish /ts/ using Centre of Gravity (CoG) as the acoustic measure. It shows that the articulation of /ts/ is affected by the roundedness of the following vowel, and that this is more prevalent among speakers of Argentine Danish than among speakers of Modern Danish as spoken in Denmark. The analysis also shows that within Argentine Danish, the speakers of the isolated settlement Eldorado have a larger effect of roundedness in their articulation of /ts/ than the speakers of the settlements in the Pampas and in Buenos Aires. The results are discussed from the perspective of phonological theory on enhanced coarticulation as a source of sound change and from the perspective of theory of language change in heritage languages.

It is argued that proxy relations between feature-defining and enhancing gestures in the phonetics can become phonologized. The article proposes Optimality-theoretic markedness constraints, which are grounded in phonetic enhancement and which can compel a delinked/unparsed/floating feature to be realized with another feature (or prosodic element), giving the impression of featural transmutation. Among the phonological phenomena revisited are incomplete neutralization, devoicing, vocalization, and debuccalization.

Examination of phonetic data can show when phonologization has or has not occurred. Under the general Economy assumption of generative linguistics, this is important for theoretical phonology, since only cases where it has occurred require a phonological account. A modular view of phonetics and phonology is assumed, as it is clearly consistent with generative theory. A procedure for acoustic phonetic testing for phonologization is illustrated using data from one speaker of Palestinian Arabic and one speaker of Stát'imcets Salish. The testing can confirm phonological accounts or cause their revision. How it can cause revision is illustrated with the Stát'imcets data: the speaker's retraction harmony affects a rightward vowel, which is unexpected from standard descriptions of the harmony in that language. The testing can also identify cases of phonetics-within-language. This is illustrated with the St'at'imcets speaker's schwa lowering.