The phonetic properties of fricatives have recently received a great deal of attention (Shadle 1985; Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996: ch. 5; Johnson 1997: ch. 6; Stevens 1998: ch. 8; Maniwa et al. 2009; Ramsay 2009; among others). The phonological properties of this class of sounds, on the other hand, have, with a few notable exceptions, remained largely undisputed since the publication of Chomsky and Halle (1968), which itself essentially carries on the featural analysis of fricatives in Trubetzkoy (1939) and Jakobson et al. (1952). In this analysis, the class of fricatives is characterized by the distinctive features [−sonorant, +continuant].