Abstract
This paper considers two phenomena in Tz'utujil (Mayan) phonology: final sonorant devoicing and final aspiration of plain (pulmonic) stops and affricates. Both occur word-internally in coda position, as well as word-finally. I present an Optimality-Theoretic (OT) analysis which accounts for both of these phenomena via positional constraints on [spread glottis] ([SG]). This analysis also accounts for attested variation in final aspiration and devoicing across the Mayan language family and predicts an implicational relationship between final nasal devoicing, final sonorant devoicing, and final obstruent aspiration. Final sonorant devoicing is typologically rare and somewhat difficult to explain in terms of phonetic motivation. Tz'utujil may be able to provide insight into the typology of laryngeal features and the roles of contrast and phonetic pressures in phonology.
Highlights
Much of the literature on final laryngeal phenomena has focused on neutralization (e.g. Lombardi 1995, Wetzels & Mascaró 2001, Iverson & Salmons 2006)
Sonorant devoicing differs from obstruent devoicing in that the default state of sonorants is generally believed to be [+voice]
4.1 Features and contrast My above analysis of aspiration and devoicing as [SG] phenomena could potentially provide a puzzle for the Contrastivist Hypothesis (Hall 2007, Dresher 2009) in (19), which claims that the only features active in a language’s phonology are those active in creating phonemic contrasts in that language
Summary
Much of the literature on final laryngeal phenomena has focused on neutralization (e.g. Lombardi 1995, Wetzels & Mascaró 2001, Iverson & Salmons 2006). Questions have arisen as to the nature of the laryngeal features at play in these neutralizations It has been convincingly argued (e.g. Beckman et al 2013) that Dutch, for example, has a true voicing distinction, contrasting voiced (negative VOT) phonemes with voiceless (positive VOT) counterparts, while closely-related German has an aspiration distinction. Myers and Padgett (2014) discuss vocal fold spreading in anticipation of post-utterance breathing, as well as the decline over the course of the utterance of the subglottal pressure necessary to drive vocal fold vibration They posit that word-final devoicing results from the phonologization of this phonetically-driven devoicing and generalization to the word-level (see §4 for further discussion). Tz’utujil differs from many of the languages featured in work on final devoicing and laryngeal neutralization in that its consonant inventory does not contain a straightforward binary contrast between either voiced and voiceless obstruents (a [voice] contrast) or aspirated and unaspirated obstruents (a [SG] contrast).
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