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

The data indicate that there is little tendency for voicelessness in sonorants
preceding word-initial fortis stops for any of the subjects. Several
instances have been noted, though, in which a slight frication noise occurs
on the nasal–stop juncture. The most straightforward interpretation
of this noise is that it is a short period of voicelessness before the full
stop closure. The noise is quite hard to notice in auditory analysis, and
can be confusing when it shows up on a spectrogram, as in Figure 4–7.
4.2.3 Word-medial and word-final fortis stops
The data on CSw word-medial and word-final have been divided into
five main groups, according to (i) the syllable type in which the stops occur,
(ii) whether they occur in content or function words, and (iii) the syllable’s
type of lexical stress. Table 4–3 displays an overview of these
groups. The first group (exemplified by the word båten) contains content
words in which a fortis stop occurs in a VC syllable with primary or secondary
lexical stress. Examples of such words include djup ‘deep,’ båtar
‘boats,’ segelbåt ‘sail boat,’ rakt ‘straight,’ and spikrakt ‘straight as an
arrow (lit. “nail”).’ In spikrakt the first syllable has primary stress and
the second syllable has secondary stress. The target syllable in these examples
appears in boldface. Such words will henceforth be referred to as
båten type words.
Table 4–3. Words used to represent the different word categories discussed in
connection with the CSw data analysis.
Word type
exemplifier
Lexical
stress
– 118 –
Syllable
type
Content
vs. function
båten prim./sec. VC(C) content
mot prim. VC function
vatten prim./sec. VC / VCC content
att prim. VC / VCC function
norrut unstressed VC cont./func.
The second group (exemplified by mot ‘against’) contains function
words in which a fortis stop occurs in a VC syllable. There are only
three words in the data at hand that have been assigned to this group