Voice and aspiration: Evidence from Russian, Hungarian, German, Swedish, and Turkish

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate a variety of languages with laryngeal contrasts that have usually been characterized in the literature of generative phonology as having a two-way [voice] contrast and to show that by adopting a narrower interpretation of [voice] to cover only those languages which exhibit prevoicing in word-initial stops, a better understanding of the laryngeal contrasts and assimilation of laryngeal features in these languages is possible. We consider Hungarian, Russian, German, Swedish, and Turkish, which have all been analyzed as having a two-way [voice] contrast for stops. We suggest that the feature [voice] is indeed appropriate for Hungarian and Russian, that the feature of contrast in German is [spread] and that, in Swedish and Turkish, both [voice] and [spread] occur in underlying forms. Analyses are provided for these stop systems in the framework of Optimality Theory.

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