Positional Neutralization - Linguistics - University of California ...

contradictions this entails described below) to highlight the connection between the
allophonic creaky phonation characteristic of phrase-final syllables in many languages
(e.g., English, as treated in Henton and Bladon (1988), or in Russian as manifest in the
spectrogram above) and phonological epenthesis of final //, often ultimately in heavily
grammaticalized circumstances, as Hyman (1988) illustrates for Dagbaani. I will assume,
along with Hyman (1988), that at least in many cases the epenthetic final glottal stop so
common in the languages of the world is ultimately the phonologization of allophonic
phrase-final creak. That there is an intimate enough connection both articulatorily and
perceptually for such a scenario to be plausible is clear from the discussion of glottal
stops in Ladefoged and Maddieson (1996: 73-77) as well as from the analysis of
compensatory lengthening triggered by loss of glottal stop in Kavitskaya (2001).
Specifically, while glottal stop is definitionally at least produced by a complete adduction
of the vocal folds resulting in the momentary cessation of glottal airflow, it is in fact
often realized allophonically in many (if not most) languages whose inventories contain
such a segment without full closure of the glottis. According to Ladefoged and
Maddieson (1996: 75), “In place of a true stop, a very compressed form of creaky voice
or some less extreme form of stiff phonation may be superimposed on the vocalic
stream”.
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