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Comparative Study of Estonian Swedish Voiceless Laterals: Are Voiceless Approximants Fricatives?

Author

Summary, in English

Are voiceless approximants categorically distinct from voiceless fricatives? We address this question by means of acoustic analysis of voiceless laterals in Icelandic, Welsh, and the endangered variety

Estonian Swedish. All three have a voiceless lateral functioning in contrast to a voiced lateral approximant. The analysis focused on duration – including any period of voicing (‘pre-voicing’) just

before the release of the lateral – and the intensity of the voiceless lateral relative to the following vowel. Welsh showed no pre-voicing in the lateral, whilst Icelandic and Estonian Swedish did, though

the latter less consistently. The Welsh voiceless lateral was also greater in relative intensity. This could be taken as a difference of phonetic category between a fricative [ɬ] in Welsh as against a

voiceless approximant [l̥ ] in the other two languages, but we argue that the complexity of the data from Estonian Swedish excludes a categorical interpretation.

Publishing year

2015

Language

English

Publication/Series

Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

University of Glasgow

Topic

  • General Language Studies and Linguistics

Keywords

  • Estonian Swedish
  • pre-voicing
  • phonetic categories
  • lateral fricative
  • voiceless lateral

Conference name

the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVIII)

Conference date

2015-08-10 - 2015-08-14

Conference place

Glasgow, United Kingdom

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 2412-0669
  • ISBN: 978-0-85261-941-4