Pharyngealization in Chechen is gutturalization

Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Languages of the Caucasus (2013), pp. 81-9

An Emergent Approach to the Guttural Natural Class

The post-velar consonants (uvulars, pharyngeals/epiglottals, glottals) have been argued to form an innate and universal phonological natural class (e.g. by McCarthy 1994). Under this hypothesis, languages should have an equal likelihood of showing evidence for the guttural natural class regardless of which post-velar consonants are present in each language. However, typological evidence from P-base (Mielke, 2008) shows that languages with pharyngeal consonants are significantly more likely to show such evidence than languages with just uvulars and glottals. This paper argues that the reason that languages with pharyngeals are more likely to show evidence of the guttural natural class is that pharyngeals are able to pull other consonants into phonologically patterning with them for both articulatory and acoustic reasons. The epilaryngeal constriction used in pharyngeal consonants facilitates articulatory links with uvulars and glottals. The acoustic effects of pharyngeals and uvulars on adjacent vowels are also similar, providing another means for these segments to pattern together phonologically. A preliminary analysis in Optimality Theory of the effects of post-velars on vowels is proposed in which markedness constraints refer to similarity scales that relate post-velar consonants to vowels. The guttural natural class, rather than being innate, emerges from phonological patterns with phonetic underpinnings

Front Matter

This volume contains 34 of the 51 talks given at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS 36), held in Berkeley, California, February 6-7, 2010. The conference included a General Session, one Special Session entitled Language Isolates and Orphans, and one Parasession entitled Writing Systems and Orthography. It was planned and run by the second-year graduate students in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. The members of this executive committee were Jessica Cleary-Kemp, Clara Cohen, Stephanie Farmer, Melinda Fricke, Laura Kassner, and John Sylak-Glassman