Preaspiration in the Nordic Languages: Synchronic and Diachronic ...

Several spectrographic examples of postaspirated stops are given in
the following section on preaspiration and sonorant devoicing in wordinitial
fortis stops.
4.2.2.3 Preaspiration duration and sonorant voicelessness
The data on preaspiration before word-initial fortis stops in Central
Standard Swedish (CSw) are a subset of the data on word-initial fortis
stops analysed in the preceding section. In all, 147 occurrences of postvocalic,
word-initial fortis stops were analysed (these are found in
sequences such as bara tittar, jag kommer, med palmer) 1 . Of these, 38
were from subject CK, 18 from GT, 45 from MP and 46 from FS.
The data indicate that for three of the four speakers, CK, GT and
MP, there was almost no tendency for preaspiration before word-initial
fortis stops. FS had a slight preaspiration before such stops in 21 of the
46 occurrences, usually consisting of a breathy voice offset ranging
between approximately 10–35 ms. Thus, although a slight tendency to
preaspirate such stops was observed, it was not the dominant pattern, and
was hardly noticeable in auditory analysis when it did occur.
v h h
Figure 4–5. Subj. FS: […] vi till
täl[tet…] ‘…we (come) to the tent…’
1 In some function words, word-final consonants are almost never realised in spontaneous
speech. For example, the first person pronoun jag is typically pronounced as [j]
or [j] and the preposition med ‘with’ is pronounced as [m] or [m], even when the
following word begins with a vowel. Therefore, these are treated as not having a final
consonant in this analysis.
– 116 –
h
Figure 4–6. Subj. FS: […] här
tenn[is] ‘…here tennis’