VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
possible while speaking. Since, on the other hand, the hearer should understand what
the speaker wants to say, the speaker has to find a middle way; the speaker has to
balance his or her laziness with the willingness of the listener to understand what he or
she is saying. In such a dichotomous concept, speaker and listener are conceived as
antagonistic (“tug of war” – Lindblom 1990). The intention of the speaker, in this
concept, is to deviate as little as possible from a neutral vocal tract configuration.
“[…] that unconstrained a movement tends to default to a low-cost form of behavior.
Accordingly, when an /i/ is produced without a bite-block, a tongue gesture is invoked that
deviates little from a neutral configuration (‚economy’).“ (Lindblom 1990: 417)
Unfortunately, the speaker has to move the articulators, otherwise the other person
would not understand what he or she wants to tell him or her. I will show in 6.4 that the
result of such an attitude from the side of the speaker is by no means an increased
application of processes of ease of articulation, but, on the contrary, a very unsystematic
application of all sorts of processes. Moreover, articulatory analyses emphasize the high
precision with which we move our articulators (Wood 1982, Mooshammer 1998, Hoole
& Mooshammer 2002), a tug of war attitude on the side of the speaker could never
result in high articulatory precision.
Therefore, a dichotomous concept, in which the speaker’s needs are in contra-
diction to the needs of the listener, is wrong. The results of discourse analysis work
vividly show that in speech situations, speakers are highly interested in being listened
to, that they even interrupt others in order to speak themselves, that they try to draw
attention to themselves, and that they want to be evaluated positively by the listeners,
both as concerns content and form 5 .
Processes usually classified as ease of articulation are, in fact, responses to
sequences excluded by prelexical processes (see 1.2), e.g. the widespread process of
nasal assimilation, where the nasal consonant assimilates to the place of articulation of
5 This is, of course, a highly shortened account of social interaction; the reader is referred
to sociolinguistic literature for a thorough picture of how social interaction works in its
multiple facets. The presentation suffices, however, to show that the speaker’s intention is
not guided by a principle of least effort.