Glottalization

The phonological behavior of ejectives and implosives as well as their relation with other glottalic sounds pose a number of serious problems to current phonological theories. This paper reveals some of these deficiencies and presents an alternative representation of these segments based on the notion of phonological complexity, as proposed in Sagey (1986) and tentatively applied to glottalized sounds in McCarthy (1989).

The evolution from final obstruents to final glottal stop and then to rhyme glottalization (i.e. from /at/ to /aʔ/, then to /aˀ/) is a well-established general trend in the history of the Sino-Tibetan language family and beyond. It has further been shown by laryngoscopy that in three languages which retain the non-released syllable-final obstruents /p/, /t/ and /k/ (Standard Thai, and two Chinese dialects), these obstruents are often accompanied by a glottal stop. The present research raises the issue whether there is another typological possibility: can non-released final obstruents be accompanied consistently by modal phonation, without glottal stop? Analysis of electroglottographic recordings of 126 syllables in two carrier sentences spoken by four speakers shows that, in Hanoi Vietnamese, the final obstruents /p/, /t/ and /k/ are not accompanied by glottalization, and that the open quotient increases in the course of the syllable rhyme. Obstruent-final rhymes (which may carry either of two tones: D1 or D2) are compared with nasal-final rhymes which, under one of the tones (tone B2), are confirmed to be glottalized. Our finding is that tones D1 and D2 (i.e. obstruent-final rhymes) are both produced in modal voice, which shows that the typological paradigm of observed realizations of syllable-final obstruents must be enlarged. The discussion puts forward the hypothesis that the unusual association of segments and voice quality found in Hanoi Vietnamese is a strategy to maintain the opposition between B2-tone and D2-tone rhymes.

In this study I investigate the phonological status of the laryngeals sounds h and ʔ that occur in root morphemes in Desano, an Eastern Tukanoan language spoken in the Vaupés region of Brazil and Colombia. In previous descriptions of this language, the glottal stop ʔ and the glottal fricative h that occur in a subset of roots have been characterized as full consonant segments. This study presents an alternative analysis, providing evidence that, in Desano, the realization of h and ʔ is better treated as one single prosodic phenomena, called suprasegmental laryngealization. This alternative analysis provides an explanation for the unusual characteristics of h and ʔ when compared to the other consonants in the language.

The study sets out a decription of the phonological system of Oromo. It includes a presentation of the sounds and phonemes of the language and the way they tend to combine, as well as a description and classification of regular and contextually well-defined processes of sound change. Suprasegmental patterns are described in less detail. The description is based on the Western dialects, among which Mechaa (spoken in the Wellegga area) is the major representative. Dialectal variation is pointed out whenever significant correspondences can be established through the descriptions of previous works.

This paper examines the glottalization of word-medial /t/.  We used acoustic profiling (cf. Docherty & Foulkes 1999) to identify two strategies used in Pacific Northwest and Utah English to realize word-medial glottalization before alveolar nasals in primary-stressed contexts  (e.g., button, broadly transcribed as [bʌʔn̩]).  While /t/-glottalization is common in American English, different acoustic realizations may be subject to geographic and social distributions (Eddington & Savage 2012). This paper will investigate the acoustic cues of different glottalization strategies and offer best practices for identifying and measuring glottalized /t/.

This paper looks at the use of /r/-sandhi in the speech of Queen Elizabeth II. Potential contexts of /r/-sandhi were identified and analysed for the presence or absence of rhoticity and glottalisation in a corpus of Christmas speeches over a period of seven decades. The results show that the Queen avoids intrusive /r/ altogether but that she uses linking /r/ in most potential cases, that glottalisation is common when /r/-sandhi is not used, and that linking /r/ and glottalisation can also co-occur. A comparison with a longitudinal corpus of speakers also shows that the Queen resembles group-level trends in the case of linking /r/ but differs in the case of intrusive /r/. The results also indicate that a number of phonetic and usage-based variables influence linking /r/ usage, including previously unreported factors such as vowel quality collocation frequency. The findings are discussed in the context of usage-based theory.

Glottalization of coda /t, p/ is a common process in American English. This study uses acoustic measures to determine when coda glottalization occurs in the conversational speech of the Buckeye Corpus. Vowels preceding coda /t, p/ tokens for 40 speakers were analyzed using H1*–H2*, an acoustic correlate of glottal constriction. Results indicate that coda glottalization is more common before a sonorant, and this effect is still found phrase-finally, even when phrasal creak is taken into account. Nonetheless, the process occurs in other environments. While we conclude that coda glottalization may occur to enhance the voicelessness of coda /t/ before sonorants (Pierrehumbert 1995, Stevens & Keyser 1989), we argue that this cannot fully explain the phenomenon.

Many phonetic phenomena that occur in connected speech are classified as phonetic periphery where anything can happen. A well-known convenient way to fix any phonetic phenomenon using certain symbols is transcription. The current paper aims at showing the model of predicting allophones by coordinating a number of factors that determine the choice of a particular allophone and visualizing the result changing certain letters into corresponding IPA symbols. Free Pascal compiler and Geany editor are used for programming purposes. The model is created for American English. It is tested for tap and glottal burst, the latter being one of the three glottalization patterns. The difference of the combination of factors for purely linguistic analysis and for computer programming is explained. We demonstrate (i) the framework for integrating separate blocks each dealing with one phenomenon (ii) a block for tapping which is almost finalized and a part of a block on glottalization, particularly p...

This is a short (one page, with 8 pages of tables) presentation about the use of glottal symbols to help learners pronounce Chavacano words correctly, as well as to differentiate Chavacano loanwords and similar words in other Philippine languages.

This paper examines the glottalization of word-medial /t/.  We used acoustic profiling (cf. Docherty & Foulkes 1999) to identify two strategies used in Pacific Northwest and Utah English to realize word-medial glottalization before alveolar nasals in primary-stressed contexts  (e.g., button, broadly transcribed as [bʌʔn̩]).  While /t/-glottalization is common in American English, different acoustic realizations may be subject to geographic and social distributions (Eddington & Savage 2012). This paper will investigate the acoustic cues of different glottalization strategies and offer best practices for identifying and measuring glottalized /t/.

In American English, the presence of creaky voice can derive from distinct linguistic processes, including phrasal creak (prolonged irregular voicing, often at edges of prosodic phrases) and coda /t/ glottalization (when the alveolar closure for syllable-final /t/ is replaced by or produced simultaneously with glottal constriction). Previous work has shown that listeners can differentiate words in phrasal creak from those with /t/ glottalization, which suggests that there are acoustic differences between the creaky voice derived from phrasal creak and /t/ glottalization. In this study, we analyzed vowels preceding syllable-final /t/ in the Buckeye Corpus, which includes audio recordings of spontaneous speech from 40 speakers of American English. Tokens were coded for presence of phrasal creak (prolonged irregular voicing extending beyond the target syllable) and /t/ glottaliza-tion (whether the /t/ was produced only with glottal constriction). Eleven spectral measures of voice quality, including both harmonic and noise measures, were extracted automatically and discriminant analyses were performed. The results indicate that the discriminant functions can classify these sources of creaky voice above chance, and that Cepstral Peak Prominence, a measure of harmonics-to-noise ratio, is important for distinguishing phrasal creak from glottalization.

Nivaĉle is the only Mataguayan language where glottalization in vowels has been reported as a contrastive feature. Specifically, Stell (1989:97) postulates a phonemic distinction between plain vowels /i e a ɑ o u/ and ‘glottalized’ vowels /ỉ ẻ ả ɑ̉ ỏ ủ /. As well, she treats the glottal stop as an independent consonantal phoneme in the language /ʔ/. Contra Stell (1989), it is proposed that there is no phonological opposition between modal vowels vs glottalized vowels; Nivaĉle glottalized vowels are sequences of /Vʔ/, vowel plus moraic glottal stop with different prosodic parsings. The glottal stop and its associated mora can either attach to the Nucleus of the syllable or to the syllable, in coda position. As a result, two different surface realizations result (i) rearticulated/creaky vowels, represented variably as [Vʔ V̰ ] (careful speech) ~ [V̰] (casual speech) and (ii) vowel-glottal coda, [Vʔ]. Unifying these several properties, it is claimed that Nivaĉle glottalized vowels are underlyingly bimoraic and are licensed by the head of an iambic foot; the Nivaĉle language has a quantity-sensitive stress system. The proposed analysis offers a
principled explanation of two prosodic properties related to the distribution and characteristics of Nivaĉle glottalized vowels. First, duration is a statistically significant acoustic property that differentiates modal from creaky/rearticulated vowels in Nivaĉle; the non-modal vowels are (almost) twice as long as their modal counterparts. Second, glottalized vowels consistently deglottalize, that is, they lose their [c.g.] feature (and thus shorten) in unstressed/non-head position.

Oromo, a Cushitic language of Ethiopia and Kenya, is a language characterized by particularly complex morphophonology. It provides extremely interesting data for linguistic research on the nature of long vowels and geminate consonants, because long sequences are very common and have a high functional load. The focus of this study is to provide a systematic description and analysis of long sequences, with particular reference to the grammatical functioning of the length parameter. The findings prove that there is a length morphological unit that is phonologically interpreted as a copying process, it can also be asserted that the language treats vowel and consonant length in a systematic way. The analysis supports the autosegmental interpretation of long segments as single units in the quality tier and as two units in the quantity tier. However, some data contradict the universal and obligatory nature of this representation in identical segments belonging to different morphemes, because distinctions between many-to-one and one-to-one associations are necessary to account for the facts of particular languages. This dissertation works within the theory of phonological weight, because it permits the autosegmental expression of significant differences between the segments according to their initial and final quantity as well as to the way in which the quality tier associates with the quantity tier.

Vietnamese is a tone language in which the tone is a complex bundle of pitch and voice quality characteristics. The present study is restricted to Falling tones (ie it does not cover tone C2, called nga in Vietnamese spelling, which has medial glottalisation and ends on relatively high pitch), and deals mainly with tone C1 (hoi). This tone is generally described as falling then rising, but interestingly, some speakers realise it simply as falling. The primary aim of this paper is to investigate how these speakers maintain tone C1 ...