ABSTRACT
This dissertation is about the phonetics and phonology of lexical roots in Ju∣'hoansi, a Khoisan language with a very rich inventory of consonants, vowels, and tones, and correspondingly rigid constraints on what sequences, segments and combinations of tones and segments can occur at different positions in the root. More specifically, the dissertation has two aims. First, it explores the acoustic properties that unify the class of gutturals in the language. Gutturals are a set of phonemes that include not only consonants with marked pharyngeal and laryngeal articulations, but also vowels with a pharyngeal constriction or one of two non-modal laryngeal stricture properties. Gutturals can be identified as a natural class because of their role in several salient phonotactic constraints. Second, the dissertation describes several phonotactic constraints that operate within the lexical root and that refer in one way or another to guttural features.
