Glottalized lateral in Rikvani Andi: an acoustic study

Abstract

Glottalized sonorants are a rare sound type that has been under scrutiny for a number of reasons of general relevance to the phonetic theory. It has been claimed that the timing of glottalization of glottalized sonorants may shift in accordance with the position in the syllable onset (pre-glottalization) or coda (post-glottalization), to provide a cue for its place of articulation; other studies argued against this claim. The paper investigates acoustic properties of the glottalized lateral in Rikvani Andi, a one-village dialect of Andi (East Caucasian). Based on the data from elicitations and free narratives, we consider the acoustic correlates that have been argued in the literature to differentiate glottalized sonorants from their modal counterparts, including aperiodicity, intensity, duration and spectral tilt. In Rikvani Andi, all of the correlates prove to be statistically significant in recordings of isolated words, but the differences tend to decrease in free narratives. The timing of glottalization does not support the existing generalizations – while the glottalized lateral only occurs in Rikvani Andi in the syllable onset, it tends to be mid- to post-glottalized. We discuss two possible explanations of why the Rikvani Andi glottalized sonorant fails to comply with typological expectations.