Laryngeal Features of Armenian Dialects

This paper concerns the laryngeal features of the Armenian stop system in a comparative perspective. First we will summarize a well-known problem in Armenian historical phonology, concerning the status of the series traditionally called “voiced.” Then we will present the acoustic data from field research, carried on in the Republic of Armenia, on different Armenian dialects, and we will discuss a possible phonological analysis, in both synchronic and diachronic terms. In the end we will analyze the position of the Armenian language in an Indo-European perspective, with special regard to Indo-Aryan reflexes of Indo-European stops. The aim of this study is to motivate a line of research in the area of Indo-European consonantism, based on the hypothesis that the Indo-European series of stops traditionally called “voiced aspirated” could be better analyzed if specified by the [+slack vocal folds] or [-stiff vocal folds] features. For this purpose, we will make use of phonetics observations on living Indo-European varieties as arguments for their phonological analysis, and we will treat phonology of modern languages (the only ones investigable by “experimental phonology”) as an object of comparison within the perspective of Indo-European phonology, together with arguments coming from historical phonology of singular historical traditions, comparative phonology and internal reconstruction.