Weighing Preaspiration: Phonetics, Phonology, Typology of a Laryngeal Phenomenon

Preaspiration is typically discussed as a rare phenomenon, with the reasons for its relative rarity compared to postaspiration being important to investigate. This approach parallels research on typologically rare segments like postaspirated fricatives (Jacques, 2011) or glottalized sonorants (Blevins, 2003), and implicitly presents preaspiration as a property of the following segment. This thesis addresses some longstanding contradictions in the phonology and typology of preaspiration, reassessing the prosodic status of this phenomenon and arguing that its traditional conception in the literature does not align with crosslinguistic phonetic and phonological patterns. Contra the commonly held assumption that preaspiration is a laryngeal property of the following segment (i.e., a “mirror image” of postaspiration), preaspiration is shown to be prosodically associated to the preceding syllable in all attested cases, typically bearing moraic weight, and thus often indistinguishable from a discrete coda [h] segment. This position is supported by a typological survey, starting from the “classic” cases of preaspiration and expanding to cases which are not traditionally described using this term, examining the phonological and phonetic evidence for the prosodic status of preaspiration in each case. This thesis also features phonetic data from North Saami, in which preaspiration is indisputably moraic but has been argued to be phonologically distinct from other coda consonants (Bals Baal, Odden, & Rice, 2012); additional data show that there is no clear evidence that this must be true. The cross-linguistic patterns observed here support a reinterpretation of preaspiration: it is not necessarily dependent on the [±spread glottis] status of the following consonant, as it may appear before both aspirated and unaspirated consonants, or before a consonant with no contrastive laryngeal specification; and it may in many cases serve as a phonological length-preserving strategy akin to compensatory vowel lengthening, or a prosodic mechanism for ensuring syllables are heavy. The typological survey also shows that preaspiration is much more widespread than generally thought, and thus a new perspective on this phenomenon may show it to not be rare at all, but rather a part of the prosodic phonology of many languages.

Department dc:contributor.department

Linguistics

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Craioveanu, Radu

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Rice, Keren D.

• moras
• phonetics
• phonology
• preaspiration
• prosodic structure
• typology

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/129883

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/129883