Introduction

Arabic and Interior Salish languages are distinguished from other languages in having a wide variety of consonant series that have constrictions in the back part of the vocal tract. These include pharyngeals, uvulars and uvularised segments. These languages are similar in that the pharyngeals, uvulars and emphatics seem to pattern together and form a natural class with respect to a variety of phonological processes. This natural class is generally called the guttural natural class. However, these two language groups differ in that while the laryngeal consonants [?] and [h] of Arabic behave as members of the guttural class, the laryngeals of Salish usually cannot be grouped with gutturals. One important question is why these language groups differ in their treatment of the laryngeal consonants.

McCarthy (1994) and Hayward and Hayward (1989) raised a more general question: why would the emphatics, uvulars, pharyngeals (and laryngeals in Arabic) be a natural class in the first place? In Feature Geometry (Halle 1995; Sagey 1986; McCarthy 1988), feature nodes, which define natural classes, are associated with active articulators. McCarthy (1994) reviews a number of phonetic studies of Arabic and concludes that the guttural class presents a problem for this view; there is no single active articulator for the gutturals. There have been two previous proposals that attempted to address this problem. The first, which is the generally accepted analysis, is to allow for ‘articulatory zones’ (Hayward and Hayward 1989; Vaux 1993; McCarthy 1994; Halle 1995; Rose 1996).