The rarity of intervocalic voicing of stops in Danish spontaneous speech

Journal article

This paper provides evidence for the assumption that the precise phonetic implementation of laryngeal contrast in obstruents can have an influence on higher order linguistic structure. Traditional varieties of Jutland Danish – which are all broadly ‘aspirating’ varieties – are used as a case study. The paper shows that the precise implementation of the aspirated–unaspirated contrast in stops varied systematically in these varieties, and that this covaries with the morphophonological process of stop gradation. Stop gradation is a lenition process which is historically found in the entire Danish-speaking area, but with quite varying outcomes, which were mapped extensively by dialectologists more than a century ago. Using a large legacy corpus of sociolinguistic interviews from the 1970s, this study shows that more sonorous outcomes of stop gradation covary with higher rates of continuous closure voicing in /b d g/ and shorter aspiration in /p t k/, and vice versa for less sonorous outcomes of stop gradation

Authors: Puggaard-Rode, R; Horslund, CS; Jørgensen, H

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Open Library of Humanities
• Journal: Laboratory Phonology
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 1
• Publication date: 2022-02-15
• DOI: 10.16995/labphon.6449
• EISSN: 1868-6354
• ISSN: 1868-6346
• Language: English
• Keywords: Speech recognition; Phonology; Linguistics; Speech production; Philosophy; Phonetics; Glottis; Danish; Larynx; Psychology; Voice-onset time; Voice; Computer science