Abstract
This paper examines the role of phonetic cues to postnasal laryngeal contrasts, language-specific differences in the use of these cues, and the phonetic naturalness of the different cues. While many studies have shown that long stop closure duration is a well-established cue to voicelessness in the postnasal context (see, e.g., Cohn & Riehl 2012, who claim this to be a universal property), the present study focusses on the role of aspiration noise in maintaining a voicing contrast in the postnasal environment. It provides experimental data from the Bantu language Tumbuka to illustrate that aspiration noise can preserve a postnasal laryngeal contrast even when stop closure duration is short. Though typologically less common, we show that the use of aspiration as a cue is also phonetically motivated. Furthermore, we show that such phonetic motivation should not be directly incorporated into phonology (e.g., as markedness constraints in OT). Instead, we employ the BiPhon model (Boersma 2007), which allows for a strict distinction between the modules of phonetics and phonology, and which formalizes the mapping of phonetic cues onto phonological representations via cue constraints, avoiding the problem of phonetic determinism.
Highlights
How phonetic information should be incorporated into or influence phonological analysis is a persistent question for the phonetics-phonology interface (Hamann 2011; Hyman 2001)
We propose that the presence of aspiration, with a duration that is comparable to aspiration in simplex stops, is a crucial perceptual cue to the voicelessness of a postnasal stop in Tumbuka, overriding its short stop closure duration that might otherwise cue voicing
As an extension of Hyman’s (2001) influential study, we have shown the importance of studying the phonetic motivation of common and not so common postnasal laryngeal alternations in more detail, paying special attention to the potential auditory cues that might be present, such as aspiration noise in Tumbuka postnasal voiceless plosives
Summary
How phonetic information should be incorporated into or influence phonological analysis is a persistent question for the phonetics-phonology interface (Hamann 2011; Hyman 2001). As Hyman (2001) shows, accounting for the outputs of homorganic nasal-stop sequences (NC) is a fruitful area to test the limits of what he terms “phonetic determinism” in accounting both for cross-linguistically common phonological patterns and for less commonly attested patterns. While it is uncontroversial that one cross-linguistically. Downing & Hamann: Why phonetically-motivated constraints common output, postnasal voicing (NT > ND), has a phonetic motivation, Hyman points out that voicing is only one of a range of processes and “counterprocesses” that are found in the postnasal context:. (1) Postnasal processes and counterprocesses in Bantu
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