Neutralization of syllable-final voicing in German

Port, Robert F.; O’Dell, Michael

doi:10.1016/s0095-4470(19)30797-1

Cited by 147 publications

(116 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…12) . Phoneticians independently found that contextual neutralization can be incomplete (Dinnsen ; Port and O'Dell ; Port and Crawford ; Piroth and Janker ; Kleber, John and Harrington ). For example, some German speakers pronounce underlying voiced and voiceless obstruents differently in word‐final position, but not differently enough to enable hearers to distinguish them reliably.…”

Section: Mergers Splits and Contrastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labov, sound change, and phonological theory

Kiparsky

2016

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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Labov's empirical vindication of the neogrammarian hypothesis, his critique of functionalist accounts of sound change, and his formal principles governing vowel shifts, mergers and splits are major contributions towards solving the constraints problem in historical phonology. I explore their implications for phonological theory, and show that they connect with recent developments in Optimality Theory in mutually illuminating ways.Labov begins his landmark Principles of Linguistic Change with a volume on internal factors governing sound change (Labov 1994) that focuses on the CONSTRAINTS PROBLEM (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968): what changes are possible for a language in a given state? On the basis of typological data on sound changes and his research on ongoing change in English, he puts forward a set of principled constraints and generalizations, which the field will be building on for decades to come. Here, I take up each of the four major theoretical themes of the bookthe regularity hypothesis, mergers and splits, chain shifts, and functionalismand explore the significance of Labov's findings for generative phonology, and the ways in which recent developments in phonological theory might help advance Labov's research program.In a longer essay I would have tried to trace the remarkable trajectory from Labov

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Section: Mergers Splits and Contrastmentioning

confidence: 99%

Labov, sound change, and phonological theory

Kiparsky

2016

Journal of Sociolinguistics

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“…The underlying voicing of the obstruent in these words is evident in other morpho-phonological contexts: The plural form Wege ''paths'' is pronounced with a voiced velar obstruent [g]. It has been known for some time, however, that this neutralization is not always complete: The final consonant of Weg-type words remains phonetically different than weck-type words in both production and perception (Port & Crawford, 1989;Port & O'Dell, 1986;Slowiaczek & Dinnsen, 1985), although the effect can be subtle and has at times been controversial (Baumann, 1995;Fourakis & Iverson, 1984). A standard phonological account of word-final devoicing models the process as a categorical change in a voicing feature on the relevant obstruent, which fails to explain the existence of incomplete neutralization.…”

Section: Extending the Single-stage Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut

Dillon¹,

Dunbar

Idsardi

2012

Cognitive Science

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To acquire one’s native phonological system, language-specific phonological categories and relationships must be extracted from the input. The acquisition of the categories and relationships have each in their own right been the focus of intense research. However, it is remarkable that research on the acquisition of categories and the relations between them have proceeded, for the most part, independent of one another. We argue that this has led to the implicit view that phonological acquisition is a ‘two-stage’ process: phonetic categories are first acquired, and then subsequently mapped onto abstract phoneme categories. We present simulations that suggest two problems with this view: first, the learner might mistake the phoneme-level categories for phonetic-level categories and thus be unable to learn the relationships between phonetic-level categories; on the other hand, the learner might construct inaccurate phonetic-level representations that prevent it from finding regular relations among them. We suggest an alternative conception of the phonological acquisition problem that sidesteps this apparent inevitability, and acquires phonemic categories in a single stage. Using acoustic data from Inuktitut, we show that this model reliably converges on a set of phoneme-level categories and phonetic-level relations among subcategories, without making use of a lexicon.

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“…Final obstruent devoicing in German is a phonological process, and word-final obstruents do not contrast in voicing. Nonetheless researchers found that the preceding vowel duration and other voicing cues were distinguished between the underlyingly voiced and voiceless obstruents (Port & O'Dell 1985). Though such voicing differences are much smaller than the differences found in a non-neutralizing environment, the direction of the difference is the same between the ÔÔneutralizingÕÕ and the ÔÔnon-neutral-izingÕÕ environment (e.g.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Post‐focus prosodic phrase boundaries in Tokyo Japanese: asymmetric behavior of an f0 cue and domain‐final lengthening*

Sugahara

2005

Studia Linguistica

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The present study shows an asymmetric behaviour between an F0 cue and a durational cue in a post-FOCUS part of an utterance in Tokyo Japanese. Though F0 resetting which marks the left edge of a Major Phonological Phrase is missing at the left edge of a post-FOCUS clause boundary, word-final lengthening which marks the right edge of an Intonational Phrase is retained there. Based on this observation, Headless Post-FOCUS IP Structure is proposed, and such prosodic structure is argued to be compatible with not only the facts obtained in this study but also the theory of FOCUS and prosodic prominence.

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Neutralization of syllable-final voicing in German

Cited by 147 publications

References 19 publications

Labov, sound change, and phonological theory

Labov, sound change, and phonological theory

A Single‐Stage Approach to Learning Phonological Categories: Insights From Inuktitut

Post‐focus prosodic phrase boundaries in Tokyo Japanese: asymmetric behavior of an f0 cue and domain‐final lengthening*

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