For the phonological structure of German, Wiese (1996: 83) proposes a reduced hi-erarchy compared to the universal hihi-erarchy illustrated above. Wiese argues that the phonological utterance and the clitic group are not relevant for German due to the lack of evidence for these categories. This view is also advanced by Prinz (1991:
75ff.). The structure of the German prosodic hierarchy is illustrated below.
(7) The Prosodic Hierarchy for German (based on Wiese, 1996: 83) intonational phrase
|
phonological phrase
|
phonological word
| foot
| syllable
The single units of the prosodic hierarchy in German do not differ in their structure compared to the general hierarchy outlined above. The following paragraphs unveil the distinctive features for German. A detailed analysis of each unit may be found in Wiese (1996: 27–84).
According to Wiese (1996: 83), the highest prosodic unit in the universal hierar-chy, the phonological utterance, does not provide the opportunity to express prosodic phenomena in German that could not be expressed in the next lower unit. Similar to the intonational phrase of the universal prosodic hierarchy outlined in (2), the IP in German also marks phrase boundaries within a sentence that is syntactically analyzed in a different way (Wiese, 1996: 77ff.). In German, the existence of a phonological phrase is based on phenomena such as word deletion and stress shift – two aspects that cannot be accounted for by a similar syntactic structure (Wiese, 1996: 73ff.).
Clitics in German never cause a stress shift. Examples for clitics are contrac-tions such as ’s (short for es) as in gibt’s “are there” and m (short for dem) as in aufm “on top of”. Due to the clitics’ lack of influence on the stress pattern of
Ger-man phrases, I follow the view of Wiese (1996) and argue for the redundancy of the clitic group as an extra prosodic level in German. The example of gibt’s thus forms one syllable as the clitic ’s has a coronal place of articulation which is allowed in the syllable appendix in German (see Figure 2.5 below). Aufm, by contrast, has two syllables because the clitic m with its labial place of articulation cannot form part of the syllable appendix in German.
An extra challenge for the analysis of phonological words in German is posed by compounds as there are no strict limits on the number of nouns or noun stems involved. The example of Haust¨urschloss (“main door lock”) from Wiese (1996: 73) demonstrates that the assignment of the phonological word structure is recursive.
Each morpheme of the compound is a noun and constitutes a phonological word on its own. The label of the node combining the first two nouns is also a noun. Ac-cording to the phrase structure grammar, a category receives a bar sign (´ ) if it is identical to the category of the unit it immediately dominates. In this respect, the morphological analysis by Wiese violates the Strict Layer Hypothesis. This hypoth-esis prescribes that each prosodic unit is dominated by the next higher prosodic unit in the hierarchy. It thus does not allow two nodes on top of each other that have the same categorical label. Consequently, the Strict Layer Hypothesis is to be rejected for compounds consisting of free morphemes.
ω´
ω´
ω ω ω
Haus tür schloss
Figure 2.4: Phonological word structure of the compound Haust¨urschloss.
According to Hayes (1980) and others, feet are binary-branching. Thus, the German foot consists of a strong syllable (s) which is optionally followed by one weak syllable (w). Examples are provided by e.g., Wiese (1996: 57). According to
the binary-branching model, the word Frau “woman” forms a foot (s), as does the trochaic word Achtung “attention” (sw). The word Ferien “holidays” has an sww-pattern which leaves the final weak syllable unfooted. Further details on the internal structure of feet are provided in the passage on lexical stress in German.
The syllable structure in German follows universal structures presented in the preceding section. The German syllable consists minimally of a nucleus; the positions in onset and coda may be occupied optionally. In line with the basic structure of a syllable (c.f. Figure 2.2), the nucleus in German contains maximally two slots (Ken-stowicz and Rubach, 1987; Hall, 1992b: 47). Long vowels and diphthongs take up two positions (e.g., Hall, 1992b: 149; Wiese, 1988: 62). To a certain extent, I follow Grijzenhout and Joppen (1998: 8) in assuming that up to three segments may occur before and after the nucleus (e.g., Strich “line”, Obst “fruit”). The authors suggest that the onset offers two positions, whereas the coda offers one. According to Grijzen-hout and Joppen (1998) as well as Wiese (1988), extra coronal consonants may be attached to both syllable edges through extrasyllabicity; this view is rejected in the present thesis. According to Hall (1992b: 76), coronal obstruents that are directly dominated by the phonological word are in appendix positions of the same syllable.
These extra coronal obstruents would allow the application of phonological rules that actually do not surface. Hall provides the example of Stand “stand” where the coro-nal stop in the onset is not aspirated in the surface form. In case the word-initial strident occurs outside the syllable, the aspiration rule predicts the syllable-initial /t/
to be aspirated. Therefore, I put forward the following syllable structure for German:
σ
appendix
R
appendix
O N Co
C C C V Son C C C Figure 2.5: German syllable structure.
Three consonants may be placed in the appendix of a syllable (one in initial position and two in final position). The positions in the appendix are filled if the consonantal positions in the onset and/or coda are filled by other consonants of the syllable. In case there are three segments prevocalically, the first is always a strident (Hall, 1992b: 68); if three or four segments are following the nucleus, the final two are always coronal obstruents (Hall, 1992b: 48). Consonants that are placed in the syllable appendix usually form an exception to the Sonority Hierarchy, for example, word-initial /pt/ as in ptolem¨aisch “ptolemaic” or /Stö/ as inStrand “beach”. Such language-specific phonotactics are ranked higher than inner syllabic sound sequences prescribed by the Sonority Hierarchy. Affricates also form an exception to the Sonor-ity Hierarchy as in syllable-final position, the sonorSonor-ity does not decrease between the first and the second consonant (see below).
German allows a comparatively great variety of consonant combinations in the onset, e.g., [kn] as in Knie “knee”. Another aspect that adds to the complexity of consonant sequences in German are the affricates [>
pf], [>
ts], [>
tS] and [>
dZ] (e.g., Pferd
“horse”, Zahn “tooth”, Matsch “mud”, Dschungel “jungle”). Affricates are combi-nations of two sound segments which share their major place of articulation (labial, alveolar and palatal, respectively). Opinions on the phonological treatment of af-fricates as belonging to single units or two separate ones are divergent. In this thesis, the view of Giegerich is adopted. He claims that affricates are phonologically treated like single units (Giegerich, 1986: 103). Giegerich bases his view on Trubetzkoy’s elaboration on the distinction between a monomorphemic interpretation of two ad-jacent sound segments and a bimorphemic one (Trubetzkoy, 1962: 50ff.). According to the monomorphemic definition by Trubetzkoy, the two sound segments need to be homorganic and there must not be a syllable boundary between the two, which applies to affricates. For a critical discussion of Giegerich’s claim see Hall (1992a).
Syllabic consonants also exist in German. They do not differ from the syl-labic consonants outlined in the preceding section. Therefore, one example from Hall (1992b: 47) is cited to illustrate this phenomenon in German: lesen “(to) read” is transcribed as [le:.zn
"]. Here, the onset of the second syllable is occupied by the voiced
fricative [z] and the nucleus consists of the syllabic nasal [n
"].
The German Sonority Hierarchy conforms to a great extent to the universal Sonority Hierarchy illustrated in (6). The main difference is the separation of the liquids in the German hierarchy: /ö/ has a higher sonority compared to /l/ (Wiese, 1996: 260). Evidence is provided by the legal coda /öl/ as in Kerl “fellow, guy” but there are no examples with a coda cluster of /lö/. Further details on the German Sonority Hierarchy and the exact distance between the sound segments on a sonority scale may be found in Hall (1992b: 64) and Wiese (1996: 258ff.).
The preceding part demonstrated the language-specific regularities for the syl-lable structure of German. Sylsyl-lable-related processes such as final devoicing or aspi-ration in German do not form part of the object of research in chapters 6 and 7 and are therefore ignored at this point. More details on such processes may be found in Hall (1992b: 52ff.). The following section (2.3) is concerned with metrical properties of Italian. Details on the rules of stress assignment in German are provided in Section 2.4 below.