Schedule 73. StuTS

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 reveals analytical challenges as yet unsatisfied by current research into German morphophonology.

Fleischer, J., Kuhmichel, K. & Speyer, A. (2012). „Sprachveränderung bei Goethe: Das auslautende Schwa in den Werther-Fassungen von
1774 und 1787“, in Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 40 (3),
305–351.
Lameli, A. (2021). Remarks on the consistency of schwa apocope in the geography of German dialects. In: Nevaci, M. et al. (ed.). Ex Oriente lux. In honorem Nicolae Saramandu. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 683–702.
Lindblom, B. (1990). Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H theory, In: Hardcastle, W. J. & Marchal, A. (ed.). Speech production and speech modeling.Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 403-439.
Rabanus, S. (2008). Morphologisches Minimum: Distinktionen und Synkretismen im Minimalsatz hochdeutscher Dialekte. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 134. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Wiese, R. (2009). The grammar and typology of plural noun inflection in varieties of German. In: The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 12, 137–173.

Info

Day: 2023-05-28
Start time: 16:10
Duration: 00:30
Room: IG 0.454
Track: Phonetics and Phonology

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