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

(i.e., preaspiration > 15 ms), and 7 are produced as fricatives without a
stop closure. Function words of the hatta type—which we would expect
to be preaspirated since SG seems to have the Area 1 distribution—tend
not to be in SG’s speech. Only 3 cases are preaspirated, while 13 cases
are unaspirated. In addition to this, there are 35 instances of hatta type
words that SG produces as a fricative without a stop closure. Thus, fricatives
are, in fact, the dominant pattern for the production of stops in such
words. For the vatnið type, all 7 occurrences are preaspirated. There are
only 2 occurrences of the word type seks in SG’s data, one with a preaspirated
stop and the other with a fricative. As for the matur word type,
there are 14 preaspirated cases and 4 unaspirated cases. In addition to
this, there are 13 cases in which a fricative is produced.
Table 4–13. The number of occurrences of the three main stop variants, unaspirated
(i.e., Pr < 15 ms), fricative, and preaspirated (i.e., Pr > 15 ms) in fortis
stop word types in the Faroese data (see text).
SG
BJ
EI
MS
átta hatta vatnið seks matur
Pr < 15 ms 8 13 0 0 4
Fricative 7 35 0 1 13
Pr > 15 ms 29 3 7 1 14
Total 44 51 7 2 31
Pr < 15 ms 7 12 3 4 15
Fricative 18 19 3 0 15
Pr > 15 ms 44 0 8 2 14
Total 69 31 14 6 44
Pr < 15 ms 3 4 0 0 15
Fricative 34 44 2 3 3
Pr > 15 ms 31 10 14 1 0
Total 68 58 16 4 18
Pr < 15 ms 2 8 1 2 15
Fricative 6 17 1 0 1
Pr > 15 ms 40 8 13 4 1
Total 48 33 15 6 17
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