Abstract
It is well known that secondary articulation types, such as labialization and palatalization, as well as laryngeal modifications, such as aspiration and glottalization, can play a contrastive role in segment inventories. This article describes an investigation of such segmental modifications, whether laryngeal, supralaryngeal or nasal, on the basis of detailed analyses of each of the 317 languages in the cross-linguistic database presented in Maddieson (1984). In the first part of this investigation, the hypothesis is tested that segmental modifications occur on natural classes of consonants rather than randomly or on isolated segments. A formalism is proposed to express this regularity. Recent theoretical proposals concerning the representation of complex segments, in particular affricates, lead to predictions regarding the patterning of segmental modification on such segments; in the second part of our investigation, these predictions are tested against the cross-linguistic data on segmental modification on affricates in the same sample of languages.
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