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Place Variation in the Consonant System: The Rhenish Velarization Revisited
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
Extract
The motivations of sound change are almost exclusively treated as articulatory phenomena, even when the source and the target sounds are generated by very different articulatory mechanisms and no transitional stages can be found. What will be argued here is that seemingly regular place shifts in the articulation of consonants, such as the ones known under the term of “Rhenish Velarization” or “Rhenish Gutturalization” are actually manifestations of acoustically induced variants, very similar to those known as “slips of the ear”, which differ from one another only by the presence or absence of a single acoustic feature. The data assembled from a larger Rhenish corpus show that the operative process entails variations between labial, dental and velar place of articulation and involves stops, fricatives and nasals; its directionality is basically undetermined. Data from other sources and languages suggest that such place variations may be much more general than previously thought.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 17 - 40
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1992
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