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tongue position in addition to a primary articulation, and that these secondary
articulations are realized as off-glides from the primary articulation.
4.1 Description
As mentioned above, the two secondary articulations which occur in Mono are
labialization and palatalization. The presence of labialization is not surprising, since as
Ladefoged & Maddieson (p. 356) note, it is the most widely attested secondary
articulation in the world’s languages.
Labialization and palatalization in Mono are most often heard as the phonetically
short mid-vowels ['] and [A'], respectively, but they may also be heard as [K'] and [E]. The
fact that they are most often realized in the mid range of the vowel space as opposed to
the high range is of typological interest, since cross-linguistically they are most often
considered to correspond to high vowels rather than mid ones. Leftward vowel spreading,
which is discussed in detail in Sections 6.1 and 7.2.1, provides additional evidence that
these secondary articulations are mid rather than high in the vowel space. In one example
of this process, the quality of the vowel of a verb root is spread to the schwa of an
infinitive prefix:
(1) (K (K (K (K → K( K( K(K K( K K‘to K ask’
When the root begins with a syllable containing a secondary articulation, it is the
quality of the secondary articulation, rather than the vowel, which spreads:
(2) (C= (C= (C= (C= → A( A( A(C= A( C= C= C= ‘to stir’
In this case, the vowel of the prefix becomes A. If palatalization in Mono were
fundamentally high in the vowel space, we would expect the vowel of the prefix to
become E, yielding * C= C=.
C= C=
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