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This work investigates laryngeal and supralaryngeal correlates of the voicing contrast in alveolar obstruent production in German. It further studies laryngealoral co-ordination observed for such productions. Three different positions of the obstruents are taken into account: the stressed, syllable initial position, the post-stressed intervocalic position, and the post-stressed word final position. For the latter the phonological rule of final devoicing applies in German. The different positions are chosen in order to study the following hypotheses:
1. The presence/absence of glottal opening is not a consistent correlate of the voicing contrast in German.
2. Supralaryngeal correlates are also involved in the contrast.
3. Supralaryngeal correlates can compensate for the lack of distinction in laryngeal adjustment.
Including the word final position is motivated by the question whether neutralization in word final position would be complete or whether some articulatory residue of the contrast can be found.
Two experiments are carried out. The first experiment investigates glottal abduction in co-ordination with tongue-palate contact patterns by means of simultaneous recordings of transillumination, fiberoptic films and Electropalatography (EPG). The second experiment focuses on supralaryngeal correlates of alveolar stops studied by means of Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) simultaneously with EPG. Three German native speakers participated in both recordings. Results of this study provide evidence that the first hypothesis holds true for alveolar stops when different positions are taken into account. In fricative production it is also confirmed since voiceless and voiced fricatives are most of the time realised with glottal abduction. Additionally, supralaryngeal correlates are involved in the voicing contrast under two perspectives. First, laryngeal and supralaryngeal movements are well synchronised in voiceless obstruent production, particularly in the stressed position. Second, supralaryngeal correlates occur especially in the post-stressed intervocalic position. Results are discussed with respect to the phonetics-phonology interface, to the role of timing and its possible control, to the interarticulatory co-ordination, and to stress as 'localised hyperarticulation'.
The unfolding discussion will focus on the internal representation of turbulent sounds in the phonology of German as well as pinpoint the special status of the prime defining the quality of turbulence. It will also be argued that this prime is capable of entering into special types of licensing relations, which results in specific phonetic manifestations of forms. We shall compare the effects of two processes attested in German: consonant degemination and spirantisation with a view to revealing the role of the turbulence-defining element in the two operations. Furthermore, our attention will be focused on the workings of the Obligatory Contour Principle which, as will be shown below, exerts decisive impact on prime interplay and consequently the phonetic realization of sounds and words. We shall see that segmental identity is contingent on the languagespecific interpretation of inter-element bonds.
Aware of the importance of prime autonomy in determining the manifestation of sounds, let us start with a brief outline of the fundamental segment structure principles offered by the theory of Phonological Government.
Glottal marking of vowel-initial German words by glottalization and glottal stop insertion were investigated in dependence on speech rate, word type (content vs. function words), word accent, phrasal position and the following vowel. The analysed material consisted of speeches of Konrad Adenauer, Thomas Mann and Richard von Weizsäcker. The investigation shows that not only the left boundary of accented syllables (including phrasal stress boundary) and lexical words favour glottal stops/glottalization, but also that the segmental level appears to have a strong impact on these insertion processes. Specifically, the results show that low vowels in contrast to non-low ones favour glottal stops/glottalization even before non-accented syllables and functional words.
Identity effects in phonology are deviations from regular phonological form (i.e. canonical patterns) which are due to the relatedness between words. More specifically, identity effects are those deviations which have the function to enhance similarity in the surface phonological form of morphologically related words. In rule-based generative phonology the effects in question are described by means of the cycle. For example, the stress on the second syllable in cond[ɛ]nsation as opposed to the stresslessness of the second syllable in comp[ǝ]nsation is described by applying the stress rules initially to the sterns thereby yielding condénse and cómpensàte. Subsequently the stress rules are reapplied to the affixed words with the initial stress assignment (i.e. stress on the second syllable in condense, but not in compensate) leaving its mark in the output form (cf. Chomsky and Halle 1968). A second example are words like lie[p]los 'unloving' in German, which shows the effects of neutralization in coda position (i.e. only voiceless obstruents may occur in coda position) even though the obstruent should 'regularly' be syllabified in head position (i.e. bl is a wellformed syllable head in German). Here the stern is syllabified on an initial cycle, obstruent devoicing applies (i.e. lie[p]) and this structure is left intact when affixation applies (i.e. lie[p ]Ios ) (cf. Hall 1992). As a result the stern of lie[p]los is identical to the base lie[p].
Glide formation, a process whereby an underlying high front vowel is realized as a palatal glide, is shown to occur only in unstressed prevocalic position in German, and to be blocked by specific surface restrictions such as *ji and *ʁj. Traditional descriptions of glide formation (including derivational as well as Optimality theoretic approaches) refer to the syllable in order to capture its conditions. The present study illustrates that glide formation (plus the distribution of long and short tense /i/) in German can better be captured in a Functional Phonology account (Boersma 1998) which makes reference to stress instead of the syllable and thus overcomes problems of former approaches.
This study examines articulatory and acoustic inter-speaker variability in the production of the German vowels /i/, /u/ and /a/. Our subjects are 3 monozygotic twin pairs (2 female and 1 male pair) and 2 dizygotic female twin pairs. All of them were born, raised and are still living in Berlin and see their twin brother or sister regularly. We assume that monozygotic twins that are genetically identical and share the same physiology should be more similar in their articulation than dizygotic twins but that the shared time and social environment of twins, regardless of their genetic similarity, also plays a crucial role in the acoustic similarity of twins. Articulatory measurements were made with EMA (Electromagnetic Articulography) and the target positions of the produced vowels were analyzed. Additionally, the formants F1-F4 of each vowel were measured and compared within the twin pairs. Our data seems to point out the importance of a shared environment and the strong influence of learning over the anatomical identity of the monozygotic twins regarding the production of vowels. But, additional results suggest (1) the impact of physiology on the production of a vowel following a velar consonant and (2) the interaction of physiology and stress in inter-speaker variability.
German linking elements are sometimes classified as inflectional affixes, sometimes as derivational affixes, and in any case as morphological units with at least seven realisations (e.g. -s-, -es-, -(e)n-, -e-). This article seeks to show that linking elements are hybrid elements situated between morphology and phonology. On the one hand, they have a clear morphological status since they occur only within compounds (and before a very small set of suffixes) and support the listener in decoding them. On the other hand, they also have to be analysed on the phonological level, as will be shown in this article. Thus, they are marginal morphological units on the pathway to phonology (including prosodics). Although some alloforms can sometimes be considered former inflectional endings and in some cases even continue to demonstrate some inflectional behaviour (such as relatedness to gender and inflection class), they are on their way to becoming markers of ill-formed phonological words. In fact, linking elements, above all the linking -s-, which is extremely productive, help the listener decode compounds containing a bad phonological word as their first constituent, such as Geburt+s+tag ‘birthday’ or Religion+s+unterricht ‘religious education’. By marking the end of a first constituent that differs from an unmarked monopedal phonological word, the linking element aids the listener in correctly decoding and analysing the compound. German compounds are known for their length and complexity, both of which have increased over time—along with the occurrence of linking elements, especially -s-. Thus, a profound instance of language change can be observed in contemporary German, one indicating its typological shift from syllable language to word language.
Dialectal variation in german 3-verb clusters : a surface-oriented optimality theoretic account
(2004)
We present data from an empirical investigation on the dialectal variation in the syntax of German 3-verb clusters, consisting of a temporal auxiliary, a modal verb, and a predicative verb. The ordering possibilities vary greatly among the dialects. Some of the orders that we found occur only under particular stress assignments. We assume that these orders fulfil an information structural purpose and that the reordering processes are changes only in the linear order of the elements which is represented exclusively at the surface syntactic level, PF (Phonetic Form). Our Optimality theoretic account offers a multifactorial perspective on the phenomenon.
Reduction in natural speech
(2009)
Natural (conversational) speech, compared to cannonical speech, is earmarked by the tremendous amount of variation that often leads to a massive change in pronunciation. Despite many attempts to explain and theorize the variability in conversational speech, its unique characteristics have not played a significant role in linguistic modeling. One of the reasons for variation in natural speech lies in a tendency of speakers to reduce speech, which may drastically alter the phonetic shape of words. Despite the massive loss of information due to reduction, listeners are often able to understand conversational speech even in the presence of background noise. This dissertation investigates two reduction processes, namely regressive place assimilation across word boundaries, and massive reduction and provides novel data from the analyses of speech corpora combined with experimental results from perception studies to reach a better understanding of how humans handle natural speech. The successes and failures of two models dealing with data from natural speech are presented: The FUL-model (Featurally Underspecified Lexicon, Lahiri & Reetz, 2002), and X-MOD (an episodic model, Johnson, 1997). Based on different assumptions, both models make different predictions for the two types of reduction processes under investigation. This dissertation explores the nature and dynamics of these processes in speech production and discusses its consequences for speech perception. More specifically, data from analyses of running speech are presented investigating the amount of reduction that occurs in naturally spoken German. Concerning production, the corpus analysis of regressive place assimilation reveals that it is not an obligatory process. At the same time, there emerges a clear asymmetry: With only very few exceptions, only [coronal] segments undergo assimilation, [labial] and [dorsal] segments usually do not. Furthermore, there seem to be cases of complete neutralization where the underlying Place of Articulation feature has undergone complete assimilation to the Place of Articulation feature of the upcoming segment. Phonetic analyses further underpin these findings. Concerning deletions and massive reductions, the results clearly indicate that phonological rules in the classical generative tradition are not able to explain the reduction patterns attested in conversational speech. Overall, the analyses of deletion and massive reduction in natural speech did not exhibit clear-cut patterns. For a more in-depth examination of reduction factors, the case of final /t/ deletion is examined by means of a new corpus constructed for this purpose. The analysis of this corpus indicates that although phonological context plays an important role on the deletion of segments (i.e. /t/), this arises in the form of tendencies, not absolute conditions. This is true for other deletion processes, too. Concerning speech perception, a crucial part for both models under investigation (X-MOD and FUL) is how listeners handle reduced speech. Five experiments investigate the way reduced speech is perceived by human listeners. Results from two experiments show that regressive place assimilations can be treated as instances of complete neutralizations by German listeners. Concerning massively reduced words, the outcome of transcription and priming experiments suggest that such words are not acceptable candidates of the intended lexical items for listeners in the absence of their proper phrasal context. Overall, the abstractionist FUL-model is found to be superior in explaining the data. While at first sight, X-MOD deals with the production data more readily, FUL provides a better fit for the perception results. Another important finding concerns the role of phonology and phonetics in general. The results presented in this dissertation make a strong case for models, such as FUL, where phonology and phonetics operate at different levels of the mental lexicon, rather than being integrated into one. The findings suggest that phonetic variation is not part of the representation in the mental lexicon.