Tobias Scheer

The article discusses the theory of laryngeal phonology exposed in Cyran (2014), Laryngeal Relativism. The basic assumption of this approach is that sonorants and vowels never bear phonological specifications for voicing: their voicing is only ever phonetic in nature. Therefore phonetic interpretation, i.e. spell-out of the output of phonology into phonetic categories, is central: this is where phonetic voicing leaks into neighbouring segments. In the first part of the article, the generative power of Laryngeal Relativism is evaluated, and its workings are compared with previous analyses. The impact of substance-free primes is also discussed.

The current part of the article evaluates the idea that sonorants and vowels are phonologically unspecified for voicing in all languages. This is the central assumption made by Cyran (2014), which, however, remains unsubstantiated and does not follow from any property of Element Theory. Sonorants do not undergo final devoicing, and voicing is never used for distinctive purposes in vowels. Cases where it is reported to be used to contrast sonorants are rare and subject to caution since it may not always be clear that the contrastive property is really voicing. 

The central testing ground is then intervocalic voicing. If sonorants and vowels are unable to spread voicing because they do not have any, the prediction is that intervocalic voicing is never assimilation. Instead it is argued to be a case of lenition in weak (intervocalic) position where obstruents are delaryngealized (i.e. lose their voicing prime) and therefore subject to phonetic (or interpretational) voicing. Lenition is positional and does not involve any transmission of primes. The common practice to analyse intervocalic voicing as both lenition and the spreading of some voice-related prime is inconsistent. 

The paper argues that sonority on the one hand and other segmental properties such as place of articulation (labiality etc.) and laryngeal properties (voicing etc.) on the other hand are different in kind and must therefore not be represented alike: implementations on a par e.g. as features ([±voc], [±son], [±lab], [±voice] etc.) are misled. Arguments come from a number of broad, cross-linguistically stable facts concerning visibility of items below and above the skeleton in phonological and morphological processing: sonority, but no other segmental property, is taken into account when syllable structure is built (upward visibility); processes located above the skeleton (infixation, phonologically conditioned allomorphy, stress, tone, positional strength) do make reference to sonority, but never to labiality, voicing etc. (downward visibility). Approaches are discussed where sonority is encoded as structure, rather than as primes (features or Elements). In some cases not only sonority but also other segmental properties are structuralized, a solution that does not do justice to the insight that sonority and melody are different in kind. Also, the approaches that structuralize sonority are not concerned with the question how the representations they entertain come into being: representations are not contained in the phonetic signal that is the input to the linguistic system, nor do they fall from heaven  – they are built by some computation. It is therefore concluded that what really segregates sonority and melody is their belonging to two distinct computational systems (modules in the Fodorian sense) which operate over distinct vocabularies and produce distinct structure: sonority primes are used to build syllable structure, while other computations take other types of primes as an input. The computation carrying out a palatalization for example works with melodic primes. The segment, then, is a lexical recording that has different compartments containing domain-specific primes [