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Die wortinitialen Segmente in Deutsch ja, jung sowie die Zweitkomponenten in den so genannten schließenden Diphthongen wie in Hai, Heu, Hau weisen im Vergleich zu hohen Vokalen in Kuh, Knie eine stark variierende Artikulation auf – zudem treten diese Laute in unterschiedlichen Kontexten auf. Die hier beobachtbaren Zusammenhänge zwischen Distribution und Aussprache lassen auf durch unterschiedliche silbische Positionen bedingte Allophonie schließen (Morciniec 1958; Shannon 1984; Hall 1992; für Englisch: Jakobson/Fant/Halle 1952, S. 20). Eine solche Analyse, die zudem eine erhebliche Reduktion des Phoneminventars beinhaltet, konnte sich bislang für das Deutsche nicht durchsetzen: Gewöhnlich sind sowohl die schließenden Diphthonge als auch [j] im deutschen Phoneminventar aufgeführt; letzteres Segment wird sogar meist als Frikativ klassifiziert. Der Sprachvergleich ergibt neue phonologische Generalisierungen, die eine durch Silbenstruktur bedingte allophonische Analyse stützen. Insbesondere lassen sich Abstufungen erkennen, die auf durch Sonorität bestimmte Silbifizierungsbedingungen schließen lassen.
We present evidence for the analysis of the vowels in English <say> and <so> as biphonemic diphthongs /ɛi/ and /əu/, based on neutralization patterns, regular alternations, and foot structure. /ɛi/ and /əu/ are hence structurally on a par with the so called “true diphthongs” /ɑi/, /ɐu/, /ɔi/, but also share prosodic organization with the monophthongs /i/ and /u/. The phonological evidence is supported by dynamic measurements based on the American English TIMIT database.
Calculations of F2-slopes proved to be especially suited to distinguish the relevant groups in accordance with their phonologically motivated prosodic organizations.
Evaluating phonological status: significance of paradigm uniformity vs. prosodic grouping effects
(2007)
A central concern of linguistic phonetics is to define criteria for determining the phonological status of sounds or sound properties observed in phonetic surface form. Based on acoustic measurements we show that the occurrence of syllabic sonorants vs. schwa-sonorant sequences in German is determined exclusively by segmental and prosodic structure, with no paradigm uniformity effects. We argue that these findings are consistent with a uniform representation of syllabic sonorants as schwa sonorant sequences in the lexicon. The stability of schwa in CVC-suffixes (e.g. the German diminutive suffix -chen), as opposed to its phonetic absence in a segmentally comparable underived context, is argued to be conditioned by the prosodic organisation of such suffixes external to the phonological word of the stem.
The phonological word (henceforth pword) differs from lower units of the prosodic hierarchy (e.g. foot, syllable) in that its boundaries must align with morphological boundaries. While languages are claimed to differ w.r.t. the questions of whether and which word-internal constituents (e.g. stems, prefixes, suffixes, members of compounds) form a pword there is no consensus regarding the question of which diagnostics are relevant for determining pword structure. In this paper it is argued that systematic correlations between various suprasegmental properties (e.g. stress patterns, syllable structure) motivate the existence of word-internal pwords in German.
Gaps in Word Formation
(1996)
Head alignment in German compounds: Implications for prosodic constituency and morphological parsing
(2022)
The notion of head alignment was introduced to account for the observation that in a word with multiple feet, one is more prominent than the others. In particular, this notion is meant to capture the characteristic edge-orientation of main stress by requiring the (left or right) word boundary and the respective (left or right) boundary of the head foot to coincide (McCarthy & Prince 1993). In the present paper the notion of head alignment will be applied to compounds, which are also characterized by the property that one of their members, located in a margin position, is most prominent.
The adequacy of an analysis in terms of head alignment hinges on the question of whether observable prominence peaks associate with the boundaries of independently motivated constituents. It will be argued that such links exist for German compounds, indicating reference to at least three distinct compound categories established on morphological grounds: copulative, phrasal, and a default class of “regular” compounds. The evidence for the relevant distinctions sheds light on morphological parsing, indicating that compound categories can be – and often are – determined by properties pertaining to their complete form, rather than by conditions affecting their (original) construction.
Trubetzkoy's recognition of a delimitative function of phonology, serving to signal boundaries between morphological units, is expressed in terms of alignment constraints in Optimality Theory, where the relevant constraints require specific morphological boundaries to coincide with phonological structure (Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939, McCarthy & Prince 1993). The approach pursued in the present article is to investigate the distribution of phonological boundary signals to gain insight into the criteria underlying morphological analysis. The evidence from English and Swedish suggests that necessary and sufficient conditions for word-internal morphological analysis concern the recognizability of head constituents, which include the rightmost members of compounds and head affixes. The claim is that the stability of word-internal boundary effects in historical perspective cannot in general be sufficiently explained in terms of memorization and imitation of phonological word form. Rather, these effects indicate a morphological parsing mechanism based on the recognition of word-internal head constituents. Head affixes can be shown to contrast systematically with modifying affixes with respect to syntactic function, semantic content, and prosodic properties. That is, head affixes, which cannot be omitted, often lack inherent meaning and have relatively unmarked boundaries, which can be obscured entirely under specific phonological conditions. By contrast, modifying affixes, which can be omitted, consistently have inherent meaning and have stronger boundaries, which resist prosodic fusion in all phonological contexts. While these correlations are hardly specific to English and Swedish it remains to be investigated to which extent they hold cross-linguistically. The observation that some of the constituents identified on the basis of prosodic evidence lack inherent meaning raises the issue of compositionality. I will argue that certain systematic aspects of word meaning cannot be captured with reference to the syntagmatic level, but require reference to the paradigmatic level instead. The assumption is then that there are two dimensions of morphological analysis: syntagmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for decomposing words in terms of labelled constituents, and paradigmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for establishing relations among (whole) words in the mental lexicon. While meaning is intrinsically connected with paradigmatic analysis (e.g. base relations, oppositeness) it is not essential to syntagmatic analysis.
Notions such as “corpus-driven” versus “theory-driven” bring into focus the specific role of corpora in linguistic research. As for phonology with its intrinsic focus on abstract categorical representation, there is a question of how a strictly corpus-driven approach can yield insight into relevant structures. Here we argue for a more theory-driven approach to phonology based on the concept of a phonological grammar in terms of interacting constraints. Empirical validation of such grammars comes from the potential convergence of the evidence from various sources including typological data, neutralization patterns, and in particular patterns observed in the creative use of language such as acronym formation, loanword adaptation, poetry, and speech errors. Further empirical validation concerns specific predictions regarding phonetic differences among opposition members, paradigm uniformity effects, and phonetic implementation in given segmental and prosodic contexts. Corpora in the narrowest sense (i.e. “raw” data consisting of spontaneous speech produced in natural settings) are useful for testing these predictions, but even here, special purpose-built corpora are often necessary.