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Morphophonological asymmetries in affixation concern systematic correlations between morphological properties of affixes (e.g. combination with bound versus free stems, position relative to stem (suffixes versus prefixes)) and their phonological properties (e.g. stress behaviour). The arguably most insightful approach to capturing relevant asymmetries invokes a notion of affix coherence, first introduced by Dixon in connection with his work on Yidiɲ, a nearly extinct language spoken in Northern Australia. This notion is based on a categorical division of affixes into ones that integrate into the phonological word of the stem and ones that do not. The integration of affixes is envisioned as being fully determined by phonological and morphological structure in a given language and verifiable by diagnostics relevant to phonological word domains (primarily the syllable and the foot structure). The assumption of two types of prosodic domains characterized by integrated versus non-integrated affixes is manifest in consistent asymmetries that pertain to morphophonological, phonological, and phonetic rules. This consistency constitutes compelling evidence for the structure-based analysis of the impact of various affixes on derived words, as opposed to alternative approaches to capturing these effects by associating affixes with diacritics (morpheme versus word boundary, class 1 versus class 2, stratum 1 versus stratum 2). The present entry aims to demonstrate, mostly on the basis of data from Germanic languages, the breadth of the empirical evidence in support of a fundamental role of affix coherence. Moreover, it aims to draw attention to the various implications of affix coherence for modeling relevant generalizations, in particular the necessary reference to a level of phonological representation characterized by a specific degree of abstractness (‘phonemic’).
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.
Words originating from shortening, including acronyms and clippings, constitute a treasure trove of insight into phonological grammar. In particular, they serve as an ideal testing ground for Optimality Theory (OT) and its view of grammar as an interaction of markedness constraints, which express (dis-) preferences regarding phonological structure in output forms, and faithfulness constraints, which require output forms to correspond to input structure (Prince and Smolensky 1993). This is because shortenings are characterised by a sharply diminished role of faithfulness, allowing for markedness constraints to make their force felt (“The Emergence of the Unmarked”). This article aims to demonstrate the heuristic value of shortening data for testing the OT model and for shedding light on various controversies in German phonology. A particular concern is to draw attention to the need for properly sorting the shortening data, to identify influences on phonological structure due to internal domain boundaries or to special correspondence effects potentially obscuring the view on the maximally unmarked patterns.
Silbenkurzwort
(2022)
Prosodische Morphologie
(2022)
Symbolische Repräsentation sprachlicher Lautstruktur beinhaltet die Zergliederung kontinuierlicher Rede in diskrete Einheiten, die mit einem finiten Inventar von Zeichen assoziiert werden. Die Grundidee hinter dieser Abstraktion ist, „wiederkehrendes“ Material, das trotz phonetischer Unterschiede als gleich aufgefasst wird, mit jeweils gleichen Zeichen zu assoziieren. Die Entwicklung geeigneter Verfahren zur Ermittlung einheitlicher und empirisch adäquater Abstraktionsgrade wurde in strukturalistischen Arbeiten vehement diskutiert, scheint aber allgemein seltsam vernachlässigt. In vorliegendem Beitrag wird ein solches im Rahmen der Optimalitätstheorie entwickeltes Verfahren anhand der sogenannten Vokalopposition im Deutschen vorgestellt. Verschiedene Typen konvergierender empirischer Evidenz untermauern die Annahme einer einzigen phonologisch relevanten Abstraktionsebene mit fünfzehn qualitativ unterschiedlichen Vollvokalen.
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.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in derivational morphology is to reconcile morphological idiosyncrasy with semantic regularity. How can it be explained that words with dead affixes and irregulär allomorphy can nonetheless exhibit straightforward and stable semantic relations to their etymological bases (cf. strength ‘property of being strong’, obedience ‘act of obeying’, ‘property of being obedient’)? Theories based on the idea of capturing regularity in terms of synthetic rules for building up complex words out of morphemes along with rules for interpreting such structures in a compositional fashion have not made - and arguably cannot make - sense of this phenomenon. Taking the perspective of the learner in acquisition, I propose an alternative approach to meaning assignment based, not on syntagmatic relations among their constituent morphemes, but on paradigmatic relations between whole words. This approach not only explains the conditions under which meaning relations between words are expected to be stable but also accounts for another notorious mystery in derivational morphology, the frequent occurrence of total synonymy among affixes, as opposed to words.
Der Begriff Wortprosodie bezeichnet hier die Organisation von Segmenten in die hierarchisch geordneten Konstituenten Silbe, Fuß und phonologisches Wort. Evidenz für solch eine Organisation und die ihr zugrundeliegenden Regeln findet sich in gewissen distributioneilen sowie phonetischen Besonderheiten von Segmenten. In diesem Beitrag versuche ich eine Darstellung der wesentlichen Züge der deutschen Wortprosodie als Interaktion miteinander in Konflikt stehender Beschränkungen im Sinne der Optimalitätstheorie. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Herausarbeitung unmarkierter prosodischer Strukturen auf der phonologisch-lexikalischen Ebene, da unmarkierte Strukturen einen wichtigen Bezugspunkt für die Beurteilung von Varianten bilden. Zugleich ergibt sich eine neue Perspektive auf das Verhältnis von Norm und Regel.
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.