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On the Phonology of Icelandic Pre-aspiration1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Höskuldur Thráinsson
Höskuldur Thráinsson
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Science Center 223, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
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Abstract

This paper presents a new phonological analysis of preaspiration in Icelandic. Its purpose is to get as close to the phonetic facts as possible while capturing at the same time the regular phonological character of Icelandic preaspiraton.

The paper is organized as follows: Section 1 briefly reviews some phonetic descriptions of preaspiration. Section 2 shows why preaspiration must be considered an active phonological rule in Modern Icelandic. Section 3 presents an informal description of what the preaspiration rule has to do. Section 4 gives both an autosegmental and a more conventional generative phonological statement of the rule. Section 5 gives arguments for the autosegmental analysis. Section 6 is a Conclusion, followed by an Appendix on preaspiration in other languages.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , June 1978 , pp. 3 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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Footnotes

1

This work was supported in part by the Icelandic Science Foundation and the Thor Thors Fund of the American Scandinavian Foundation. I am indebted to a number of people for help and suggestions, but most of all to Nick Clements, whose ideas and suggestions have greatly influenced my thinking about this topic, and to Hreinn Benediktsson for his encouragement and very valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. I have also benefited from comments by Kristján Árnason, John Goldsmith, Einar Haugen, Janez Orešnik, Magnús Pétursson, Alan Prince, the participants in the phonological seminar at Harvard, Spring 1977, and the workshop on autosegmental phonology at Harvard, May 21, 1977. I may soon regret that I did not always follow the advice of these people. Thanks are also due to Dennis Klatt for making it possible for me to do the phonetic measurements, to Helgi Guomundsson for referring me to a number of studies on preaspiration in other languages, and to Karl Teeter and Philip LeSourd for information on Malecite/Passamaquoddy. – An earlier version of this paper appeared in Harvard Studies in Phonology, I, 1977.

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