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

golf ‘golf,’ in which the utterance-initial stop has a voicing lead of
approximately 50 ms. A third example is given in Figure 4–32. In this
case, the utterance-initial stop occurs in a lexically unstressed syllable,
but the bilabial stop still has a voicing lead of approximately 50 ms.
These examples are representative of the production of utterance-initial,
prevocalic lenis stops in content words for the four CSw subjects.
s
Figure 4–30. Subj. CK: .deltats […] ‘The delta’s…’ The utterance-initial lenis
stop has a voicing lead. Note that this spectrogram also has an example of a
partially voiceless lateral fricative, as well as a breathy offset before the stop in
the final unstressed syllable.
Unlike content words, function words 1 do not tend to have a voicing
lead utterance-initially. An example is given in Figure 4–33, in which FS
produces där utterance-initially without any voicing lead. This type of
production is the most common one for all subjects. However, instances
in which such stops have a voicing lead do occur as well, as in the example
in Figure 4–34, in which FS produces another instance of the word
där, this time with a voicing lead of approximately 75 ms in the initial
stop.
In utterance-medial position, a vast majority of the word-initial lenis
stops occurs in a context with voicing on both sides. In practically all
these cases, the stop is voiced, both in content and in function words.
1 The list of function words contains: den (def. art.), det (def. art.), du ‘you (nom.),’ dig
‘you (obl.),’ din ‘your (sg.),’ dina ‘your (pl.),’ dom ‘them,’ då ‘then,’ där ‘there.’
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