Deep allophones in the Old English laryngeal system

Abstract

The laryngeal features of Old English fricatives, while fully predictable, nonetheless behave contrastively in the phonology. According to traditional notions of contrastiveness, this would appear to be a paradox. The paradox is resolved using the contrastive hierarchy (Dresher 1998): in the OE hierarchy, the voicing feature takes scope over all obstruents. Segments traditionally assumed as surface variants will be analyzed as "deep allophones," a characterization that explains their behaviour in OE and their subsequent historical development