INTRODUCTION

It has long been recognised that languages differ phonetically not only in their distinctive segments and prosodic features, but also in the characteristic ways in which the phonetic gestures are ‘set’, i.e. the Artikulationsbasis, articulatory settings (Honikman 1964; Laver 1980), or phonetic settings (Laver 1994). The discussion of Artikulationsbasis has a long history in the phonetic literature, especially from the point of view of the overall characterisation and contrastive description of the pronunciation of different languages (see Kelz 1971; Laver 1978; Jenner 2001 for historical accounts). Not least the great nineteenth-century phoneticians, such as Sievers, Viëtor, Sweet and Jespersen, emphasised and tried to portray cross-language differences concerning basis of articulation. In recent literature in English, the term articulatory settings (introduced by Honikman 1964) is widely used. Laver (1980, 1994) gives an extensive account of various dimensions and values of settings as features of people's habitual voice quality. Although he is primarily concerned with voice phenomena in the individual speaker, he also points out the relevance of settings for the characterisation of specific languages or language varieties (Laver 1994: 423ff). Regional variation of dialects, too, is characterised in part by differences in voice quality, an aspect which Elert has applied to Swedish dialect research (Elert 1984; Elert and Br. Hammarberg 1991). Likewise, voice can be an aspect of sociolectal variation (Esling 1978a, 1978b), and can function as a social marker of the speaker (Trudgill 1974; Laver and Trudgill 1979).