Deaspiration and the Laryngeal Specification of Fricatives in Jinghpaw

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to argue that several distinct phonological phenomena in Jinghpaw such as phonological gaps in the phoneme inventory, morphophonological alternations of prefixes, and similarity avoidance effect in the lexicon, can be uniformly accounted for in terms of deaspiration or aspiration dissimilation. The present paper, by taking into consideration that voiceless fricatives in the language are phonologically specified for [+spread glottis] like aspirated stops based on phonological gaps in the consonant inventory, shows that the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) on the [spread glottis] tier accounts for several types of prefix alternations involving aspirated stops and voiceless fricatives. This paper also examines the Jinghpaw lexicon, highlighting a distributional asymmetry involving [spread glottis] in the lexicon, and shows that the asymmetry is due to the ban against multiple [+spread glottis] on the [spread glottis] tier.*