Contrastive Role of Laryngeal Features for Plosives of the Standard Persian

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of laryngeal features on the contrastive system of the plosives in Standard Persian. First, the underlying structure of the features was examined based on the derivational approach. Then, descriptive generalization observed in the data was formalized by inviolable constraints of the filter theory and violable constraints of the optimality theory. Based on conspiracy among phonological rules, the contrastive role of the features was explained according to four violable constraints. The results showed that neutralization of the features can be explained by dominance of context-sensitive markedness constraints over faithfulness constraints of voicing and aspiration, while explaining the contrastive role of the features requires a reverse order of dominance relation mentioned above.