Vortrag: Morphological Contexts of Final Schwa Apocope in German

Schwa constitutes a word-final morpheme to mark the case and number of nouns in German. Its status as a morpheme has been debated and reduced to a solely prosodic unit due to the possibility to omit it, e.g. dem Tag(e) (Wiese 2009). Yet apocope of final schwa depends on the morphological context (Fleischer et al. 2012, Lameli 2021). I determine the concrete morphological features in the contexts of final schwa apocope to argue for a morphological conditioning of deletion. The results show a reduction of morphological redundancy and the possibility of contextual compensation to sustain the sufficient contrast (Lindblom 1999, Rabanus 2008). Modeling the apocopated data in a theoretical framework like Distributed Morphology (Embick & Halle 2005) reveals analytical challenges as yet unsatisfied by current research into German morphophonology.

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Tag: 28.05.2023
Anfangszeit: 16:10
Dauer: 00:30
Raum: IG 0.454
Track: Phonetics and Phonology

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