Glottal spreading bias in Germanic

Much theoretical phonology in the 1990s has focused on the characterization of voicing assimilations, nearly always assuming presence of the feature [voice] versus its absence in order to distinguish voiced obstruents from voiceless. While [voice] is uncontestably at play in Romance and Slavic, as well as in many other languages we show here that laryngeal assimilations in German and English provide evidence for positing instead the feature [spread glottis] as the phonologically relevant privative feature. The description of German and English laryngeal patterns in terms of [spread glottis] also simplifies our understanding of German final fortition (Auslautverhartung) and related phenomena