On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 00:25:06 +0200, Piotr Gasiorowski
<
piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
>(3 = Verner's Law) Elsewhere, fricatives stay fortis (voiceless) when
>preceded by a stressed syllable or the initial boundary of a lexical
>root; otherwise they become lenis (voiced).
>Rule 3 implies the rightward spread of some laryngeal feature that (a)
>can serve as a phonetic correlate of stress, (b) can be employed to mark
>the beginning of a word, and (c) can inhibit spontaneous voicing. The
>feature [stiff vocal folds], as proposed by Page (1998), looks quite
>plausible.
[stiff vocal chords] is somewhere along the spectrum of stiff voice ~
creaky voice / laryngealization ~ glottal stop. I think that's quite
compatible with my rising tone theory (rising tone can be realized as
Brechton / stød). Except that in my theory it works the other way: the
laryngealization marks the _end_ of the word and _promotes_ spontaneous
voicing (a laryngealized stop [= creaky _voiced_ stop] is more voiced than
a voiceless stop). The beginning of the word was marked by aspiration
(later these aspirates became fricatives), and aspiration is equivalent to
[slack vocal chords].
In general, fricatives are either voiced or voiceless (most of them,
cross-linguistically, voiceless). Ladefoged & Maddieson: "Fricatives
rarely occur with non-modal types of voicing" (p. 178). The feature
proposed by Page, and endorsed by Piotr, is of course of a different kind
(I take it to be suprasegmental, not segmental), but still I would think
that in principle, laryngeal setting parameters such as [stiff vocal
chords] are more likely to affect the evolution of stops than that of
fricatives (exception made for /s/ ~ /z/, but /s/ is indeed the one
fricative that more often occurs togther with "non-standard" laryngeal
settings [Korean stiff /s*/, Hausa ejective /s'/, etc.]).
=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...