Laryngeal features in Athapaskan languages*

In a typical Athapaskan language, consonants divide into three manners of articulation, stops/affricates, fricatives and sonorants. There are generally three major laryngeal classes in the stops/affricates, two in the fricatives and a single class in the sonorants. In this paper, I examine how laryngeal oppositions in stops/affricates and fricatives are best characterised. I argue in §§ 2—7 that stops/affricates (henceforth stops) are phonologically voiceless unaspirated, aspirated and glottalised, while fricatives exhibit a voiced-voiceless distinction. These classes do not account for all laryngeal interactions, however; evidence exists that aspiration and voicing cross-classify the stops and fricatives, with aspiration being necessary for fricatives and voicing for stops in late rules of the phonology; this is the topic of §§8-9. In addition, evidence suggests that while stops/affricates form a single class underlyingly, they are distinct at a late level. Implications of the analysis are discussed in §§10—11. Processes involving laryngeal features suggest a two-level model of phonology in which contrastive features are present underlyingly and predictable features are added postlexically for reasons of phonetic implementation. The absence of predictable features underlyingly argues against recent work that suggests that such features may be present at this level (e.g. Steriade 1992a, b, 1993b); their postlexical presence argues for a model in which the postlexical phonology is identifiable as the phonetic implementation component of the grammar (e.g. Mohanan 1986; see also Cohn 1993).