--English abstract This paper presents the treatment of the Old Chinese *sprefix in the Baxter-Sagart system of Old Chinese reconstruction. The main functions of the prefix are to increase the valency of verbs and to derive oblique deverbal nouns. The phonetic evolutions to Middle Chinese of *swith different kinds of OC root initials are discussed. Two salient features of the proposed system ar...

In Japanese loanword phonology, geminates optionally devoice when there is another voiced obstruent within the same stem, i.e., geminates may optionally devoice when they violate OCP(voice). This devoicing of OCP-violating geminates has received much attention in the recent phonological literature. However, the debates centering around this phenomenon have relied primarily on intuition-based da...

In German, word-initial lax fricatives may be produced with substantially reduced glottal vibration after voiceless obstruents. This assimilation occurs more frequently and to a larger extent across prosodic word boundaries than across phrase boundaries. Assimilatory devoicing makes the fricatives more similar to their tense counterparts and could thus hinder word recognition. The present study...

Maintaining voicing in obstruents is articulatorily challenging. During obstruent closure, intraoral air pressure goes up quickly, and as a consequence it becomes difficult to maintain a sufficient transglottal air pressure drop to produce voicing. This difficulty becomes more problematic in geminates, which have long closures (Hayes and Steriade 2004; Jaeger 1978; Ohala 1983; Westbury 1979). R...

Correspondence between the glottal opening gesture pattern and vowel devoicing in Japanese was examined using PGG with special reference to the pattern of glottal gesture overlap and blending into the neighboring vowel. The results showed that most of the tokens demonstrated either a single glottal opening pattern with a devoiced vowel, or a double glottal opening with a voiced vowel during /Ci...

In Japanese, high vowels may devoice between two unvoiced obstruents (k[u̥]kaku 'division', k[i̥]kaku 'plan'). Recent studies have shown that the devoicing of non-high vowels (k[ḁ]karu 'take', k[e̥]ta 'digit, k[o̥]tae 'answer') may also occur. This paper evaluates the role of vowel duration and vocal folds gestures involved in vowel devoicing in Japanese. An experiment using an electroglottograph (...

Steriade (1993, 1995, 1996) has proposed that the distribution of phonological contrasts is explained, not by a principle of Prosodic Licensing (Itô 1986, Goldsmith 1990) (licensing of features only in certain prosodic positions, e.g. onset position), but rather by the presence of sufficiently audible phonetic cues in the relevant contexts that signal these contrasts. For example, Steriade (199...

Nishimura (2003, 2006) pointed out that in Japanese loanwords, voiced obstruent geminates can optionally devoice when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent (e.g. /doggu/ → [dokku] ‘dog’). This devoicing pattern has been analyzed within a number of theoretical frameworks, and has thereby contributed much to address several theoretical issues. The pattern, moreover, has been studied in seve...

The behaviour of /v/ which, in languages as diverse as Hebrew, Hungarian and Russian, patterns with both sonorants and obstruents, is a puzzle for phonological theory (Jakobson, 1978; Barkai and Horvath, 1978; Hayes, 1984; Kiparsky, 1985; Padgett, 2002; Kiss and Bárkányi, 2006). In this paper I situate such cases in the broader typology of /v/’s patterning and distribution. A database of over 5...