ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I report the results of a database study, which investigates phonotactic patterns found over an 1878 root database, described in Section 3.1. I identify constraints on root size, as well as two major classes of phonotactic patterns found within Ju∣'hoansi roots, positional constraints and cooccurrence constraints. All of the constraints involve either the natural class of gutturals, or the natural class of pharyngeals (consonants or vowels specified with the place feature [pharyngeal]). I propose a new acoustically based feature, [spectral slope], which marks all guttural consonants and vowels, and thus allows a unified representation of the natural class of guttural sounds. The phonetic basis of the class of [pharyngeal] sounds is articulatorily defined, as sounds involving pharyngeal constriction. In each section, after describing the distributional patterns and offering phonological analyses, I described how these constraints might aid in language processing.
