Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1984, Page 34

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Asta Svavarsdóttir
nokkrum samanburði þeirra við norsku, færeysku, sænsku, nuckö-málið, þýsku
og ensku. Óprentuð BA-ritgerð, Háskóla Islands, Reykjavík.
— . 1981. /r/ og j\J í máltöku þriggja íslenskra barna. Óprentuð ritgerð, Háskóla íslands,
Reykjavík.
— . 1983. Máltaka barna: Hljóðfrœði og hljóðkerfisfrœði. Óprentuð kandídatsritgerð,
Háskóla íslands, Reykjavík.
Stefán Einarsson. 1945. Icelandic. Grammar. Texts. Glossary. Johns Hopkins Press,
Baltimore.
SUMMARY
This paper deals with the properties of the sonorants /1, r, n, m/ in Icelandic. The
discussion centers around the status of /l/ and its relation to the others. If /l/ is con-
sidered [+continuant], as in the Chomsky-Halle feature system, it would be expected
to group with /r/, rather than with /n/. If, on the other hand, /l/ is considered [-contin-
uant[, as its behavior in some languages might suggest according to Chomsky and Halle
(1968:318), it should rather behave like /n/ (cf. (2) on p. 10 above). The author investi-
gates this from three points of view: phonotactic, phonological, and phonetic.
The distribution of /n, 1, r/ in initial consonant clusters gives no clear support to
either possibility. In final clusters, however, the distribution of /1/ and /n/ is similar,
but the distribution of /r/ is much more restricted. The distribution of /n/ and /l/ in
intervocalic clusters is also much more similar than the distribution of/l/ and /r/.
In chapter 3, the behavior of the sonorants with respect to various phonological rules
in Icelandic is investigated; for example the length rule, the preaspiration rule, the
devoicing rule(s), the epenthesis rule, etc. It turns out that in all cases /l/ and /n/ behave
alike, but /r/behaves differently.
In chapter 4 the author argues that articulatorily, /I/ is more similar to /n/ than to
/r/. Spectrograms of these three sounds also seem to indicate that the acoustic difference
between j\j and /n/is small, but /r/ is widely different from both.
The author concludes that taken together, these three types of arguments suffice
to show that /\J in Icelandic must be counted as [-continuant].
Háskóla Islands,
Reykjavík