The rise of ternary quantity and its alignment with laryngeal articulations

Abstract The paper discusses languages with ternary quantity of vowels and consonants, analysing the evolutionary mechanisms of the rise of ternary quantity and its alignment with lexicalised laryngeal articulations. Six shared evolutionary mechanisms based on vowel coalescence and segment lengthening or shortening are distinguished, and a couple of alternative paths. Tonal stressless languages show a symmetric system where the voice quality contrast is “orthogonal” to both quantity and pitch. Stress languages manifest two types of asymmetric alignment between overlength (Q3) and laryngeal articulations: “synergistic” and “antagonistic”, the latter being more common across language groups. It appears that the synergistic alignment might instead reflect the situation in which the lexicalised laryngeal contrast is more recent and more dependent on the quantity contrast than in case of the antagonistic alignment. Additionally, an outline of an articulatory model which might account for the rise of the observed quantity-laryngeal-pitch templates in languages with ternary quantity is proposed.