A Typological Survey of the Phonological Behavior of Implosives: Implications for Feature Theories

This paper presents the first cross-linguistic investigation into the phonological behavior of implosive sounds. In many feature theories, implosives share features with obstruent sounds, plus some implosive-specific laryngeal feature. These feature theories predict, then, that implosives should pattern phonologically as a natural class with obstruents, to the exclusion of sonorants. We take a detailed look at the phonological patterning of implosives in six languages, and present results of a typological survey of implosives in 88 languages where implosives contrast with sonorants and obstruents at the same place of articulation. We find that, despite previous feature-based proposals which assume that implosives are obstruents, implosives pattern with sonorants to the exclusion of obstruents in 38% of languages in our sample. Another 32% of languages show mixed behavior, where implosives pattern with both obstruents and sonorants, depending on the specific phonological process involved. We discuss the implications of our results for the phonological featural representation of implosives, and propose future historical and phonetic studies to further illuminate the cross-linguistic behavior of implosive sounds.