http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/1750094861

Phonetics and Phonology of Tense and Lax Obstruents in German

Knowing that the so-called voiced and voiceless stops in languages like English and German do not always literally differ in voicing, several linguists -- among them Roman Jakobson -- have proposed that dichotomies such as fortis/lenis or tense/lax might be more suitable to capture the invariant phonetic core of this distinction. Later it became the dominant view that voice onset time or laryngeal features are more reasonable alternatives. However, based on a number of facts and arguments from current phonetics and phonology this book claims that the Jakobsonian feature tense was rejected premat.

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