Resumen de Some observations on aspiration and glottal fricatives in languages with a phonological contrast
In this paper I investigate aspiration and glottal fricatives as found in languages with a phonological contrast. Using a global cross-linguistic sample, I establish a typology of aspiration outcomes in diachrony. The most important processes among these include transposition of glottal fricative, the less commonly encountered transposition of aspiration, spontaneous aspiration, and spontaneous loss of aspiration, together with the phenomenon of deaspiration. I set up certain parameters, which include laryngeal compatibility, directionality, and scope, in order to study the processes of the two transpositions and systematise them, while also attempting eventually to disentangle them from the way they are defined in some of the literature. Historical trajectories in the development of aspiration, I propose, can be described in terms of a cycle in which languages add to their stock of aspirated sounds via transposition of h/ɦ typically in the pre-vocalic position, but also eliminate aspiration generally in syllable coda as a result of various processes, which appear to be triggered by phonetic changes.
