Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1984, Síða 144

142 Kristján Árnason
The second parameter, that of manner, will be assumed to have
six categories: open, closed, lateral, trill, nasal and fricative. Open
are all nuclei that Haugen calls ‘vocalic’: ber [þe:r], fet [fe:$] etc.,
and those with preaspiration: epli [ehþll], hatt [hah$] etc. The syllables
containing preaspiration may then be described as being ‘checked’
with respect to ‘voicing’ and ‘open’ with respect to ‘manner’. The
categories ciosed, trill, lateral, nasal and fricative have their traditio-
nal meaning. The interrelation between manner and voice can be
represented in the following way:
(7) open closed lateral nasal fricative trill
held ma:d - val$ lan^ viyð varð
checked mahd ba$n val^ van^ sax$ vard
As will have been noticed, the slot formed by ‘closed’ and ‘held’ is
empty, reflecting the fact that voiced stops do not occur in Icelandic.
This may be captured by a constraint: held —» not closed. The fact
that not closed —* held does not hold can be taken as support for
the assumed hierarchy between the parameters: ‘voicing above
manner’.
The third parameter, that of place, has at least the following cate-
gories: labial, dental, palatal and velar. An additional category is here
assumed to account for [s]. But since [s] has a special type of articula-
tion, another possibility is to assume a special manner category, sibi-
lant. In that case, [s] would have a status similar to trili and lateral,
since there the only place is dental (or alveolar). (These relations
could be accounted for by implicational statements like sibilant —>
dental, lateral —* dental, and trill —* dental. If any significance is to
be assigned to implicational relations of this sort, manner is to be
set above place in the hierarchy, as in done on the flow-chart in Dia-
gram 1).
To complete the account of the phonological shape of the nuclei
of stressed syllables, a parameter of vocalic quality is needed. This
may be expressed in the traditional terms of a system of vowel quali-
ties, represented by IPA-type symbols: /i/, /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, /u/, /y, /œ/,
/au/, /ai/,'/ei/, /ou/, /œy/. The question may be left open here whether
these should be seen as (abbreviatory) units at a secondary level, and
composed of more primitive vocalic features or components. For sim-
plicity of exposition it is assumed here that we are dealing with units