ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates the phonological nature and computational role of different types of boundaries in typological considerations connected with laryngeal systems. It is shown that the phonological side of the linguistic variation at different levels of structure, that is, phrase, word, syllable, as well as proclitic and enclitic boundaries can be reduced to one independently necessary mechanism of laryngeal licensing and a parameter on its transmitters. The discussion aims to be independent of the actual way in which the contrast itself is represented, and focuses on computation and phonetic interpretation of voicing phenomena alone. Additionally, a clear line is drawn between phonology and phonological variation and phonetically based typologies. The study is limited to two-way contrast systems, like Slavic, but it is easily extendable to larger systems