Laryngeal specifications in obstruents: evidence from segmental change.

One of the fundamental parts of segmental phonology is the investigation of the types of laryngeal contrasts which can be made among series of obstruents. While there has been some considerable work in this area, there is still substantial disagreement as to precisely how such contrasts should be accounted for in phonological theory. This paper, for the first time, brings some important but relatively little-known data from phonological change to bear on one major debate in this area, to argue that the subsegmental units that are required to make such contrasts are a small class of simple privative primes, which can be put to use variously in languages in order to make the different types of contrast which are found among languages. The data concerns two substantial changes which have occurred in non-standard varieties of German and English. The set of subsegmental primes (‘features, elements’) used is basically that which has found quite widespread acceptance in phonology since Lombardi (1991), and is, I argue, in essence, the same as that proposed on independent grounds in Harris (1994) and Jessen (1999). It is uncontroversial that more than one such unit is required in order to be able to characterise the contrasts in languages with more than two series of obstruents, such as, for example, /p, t, k/