Wolfgang Kehrein

Phonology and morphology of the Germanic languages

The papers collected in this volume apply principles of phonology and morphology to the Germanic languages. Phonological phenomena range from subsegmental over phonemic to prosodic units (as syllables, pitch accent, stress). Morphology includes properties of roots, derivation, inflection, and words. The analyses deal with language-internal and comparative aspects, covering the whole (European) range of Germanic languages. From a theoretical perspective, most papers concentrate on constraint-based approaches. Crucial to those theories are principles of the phonology-morphology interaction, both within and between languages. The well documented Germanic languages provide an excellent field for research and almost all papers deal with aspects of the interface.

A prosodic theory of laryngeal contrasts

Current models of laryngeal licensing allow as many laryngeal contrasts within a syllable as there are segments, at least in principle. We show here that natural languages are much more economical in their use of laryngeal contrasts than segmental models would lead us to expect. Specifically, we show that voicing, aspiration and glottalisation occur at most once per onset, nucleus or coda in a given language, and that the order in which they are produced within onset, nucleus and coda is never contrastive. To account for these restrictions, we propose that laryngeal features are properties not of segments, but of the onsets, nuclei and codas that dominate them. Phonetic transcription allows us to put in square brackets many things that languages do not actually make use of, such as aspirated glottal stops [?h] or creaky-voice h [h]. It also allows us to posit unattested contrasts like pre- vs. postglottalised nasals [?m] vs. [m?] or breathy-creaky vs. creakybreathy phonation [ae] vs. [ae] and to entertain what seem to be purely orthographic distinctions like [pha] vs. [pha]. We show here that natural language does not use such refined distinctions, and that a restrictive theory of laryngeal features treats them as properties of syllable margins and nuclei, not as properties of individual consonants and vowels.

Phonological Representation and Phonetic Phasing: Affricates and Laryngeals

The monograph contains two case studies dealing with the phonetics and phonology of affricates and laryngeals from a survey of 281 languages. The empirical findings go counter to a number of assumptions in the literature, e.g.: (1) affricates are exclusively stops from the perspective of phonology; (2) laryngeals are properties of the prosodic domains onset, nucleus, and coda; (3) phonetic strategies (affrication, laryngeal phasing) serve to make phonological specifications acoustically more salient. Theoretical discussions include questions of phonological representation (featural contours, prosodic licensing etc.) and the phonology-phonetics interface.

Event-related Potentials Reflecting the Processing of Phonological Constraint Violations

How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC iVCi). We examined three types of monosyllabic CCVC words: (a) existing words ( p k), (b) wellformed novel words ( p f), and (c) illformed novel words ( p p) as instances of Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) violations. Wellformed and illformed novel words evoked an N400 effect in comparison to existing words. In addition, illformed words produced an enhanced late posterior positivity effect compared to wellformed novel words. Our findings support the well-known observation that novel words evoke higher costs in lexical integration (reflected by N400 effects). Crucially, modulations of a late positive component (LPC) show that violations of phonotactic constraints influence later stages of cognitive processing even when stimuli have already been detected as non-existing. Thus, the comparison of electrophysiological effects evoked by the two types of non-existing words reveals the stages at which phonologically based structural wellformedness comes into play during word processing.

Segmental Structure and Tone

This volume seeks to reevaluate the nature of tone-segment interactions in phonology. The contributions address, among other things, the following basic questions: what tone-segment interactions exist, and how can the facts be incorporated into phonological theory? Are interactions between tones and vowel quality really universally absent? What types of tone-consonant interactions do we find across languages? What is the relation between diachrony and synchrony in relevant processes? The contributions discuss data from various types of languages where tonal information plays a lexically distinctive role, from ‘pure’ tone languages to so-called tone accent systems, where the occurrence of contrastive tonal melodies is restricted to stressed syllables. The volume has an empirical emphasis on Franconian dialects in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, but also discusses languages as diverse as Slovenian, Livonian, Fuzhou Chinese, and Xhosa.

Synchronic alternations between monophthongs and diphthongs in Franconian tone accent dialects: a metrical approach

This paper proposes a synchronic analysis of vowel splits between diphthongs and monophthongs in Franconian tone accent dialects (spoken in parts of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands). In some dialects, the tonal contrasts between Accent 1 and Accent 2 are accompanied by vocalic oppositions. On the basis of data from Maastricht and Sittard Franconian, I argue that a unified phonological analysis of these related phenomena (tone, vowel quality) is possible if we assume that the accents differ in their metrical structure: Accent 1 is represented as a disyllabic foot, Accent 2 as a monosyllabic foot.