The rise of ternary quantity and its alignment with laryngeal articulations

Datos Bibliográficos

ID21714383
AutoresNatalia Kuznetsova (0000-0002-3612-9127, Faculty of Linguistic Sciences and Foreign Literatures , 9371 Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore , Largo Agostino Gemelli, 1, 20123 , Milan , MI , Italy, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Volumen29
Número2
Páginas319-360
Fecha de publicación2025-07-28
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaLinguistic Typology (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1430-0532 • E-ISSN: 1613-415X
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/lingty-2023-0070
OpenAlexW4406243959
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas58

The paper discusses languages with ternary quantity of vowels and consonants, analysing the evolutionary mechanisms of the rise of ternary quantity and its alignment with lexicalised laryngeal articulations. Six shared evolutionary mechanisms based on vowel coalescence and segment lengthening or shortening are distinguished, and a couple of alternative paths. Tonal stressless languages show a symmetric system where the voice quality contrast is “orthogonal” to both quantity and pitch. Stress languages manifest two types of asymmetric alignment between overlength (Q3) and laryngeal articulations: “synergistic” and “antagonistic”, the latter being more common across language groups. It appears that the synergistic alignment might instead reflect the situation in which the lexicalised laryngeal contrast is more recent and more dependent on the quantity contrast than in case of the antagonistic alignment. Additionally, an outline of an articulatory model which might account for the rise of the observed quantity-laryngeal-pitch templates in languages with ternary quantity is proposed

Linguistics · Programming language · Ternary operation · Computer Science · Natural Language Processing Techniques · Philosophy · Phonetics and Phonology Research