VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

Sylvia Moosmüller
a given interactional situation. The phonetic plausibility of postlexical processes has
often been misinterpreted as ease of articulation. Yet, a speaker of German who
suppresses the process of fronting of back vowels in alveolar context is not worse off
than a speaker of English who applies this process. I.e., the suppression of the process
does not pose an extra difficulty for the articulators of the speakers of German,
otherwise they would not suppress it. It has been suggested that this process does not
apply in languages which have front rounded vowels in their phoneme inventories, as
e.g. German, French, Chinese (Oh 2002). However, in Cantonese, this process led to a
neutralization of front rounded vowels in alveolar contexts (Flemming 2001), a fact that
points to the application of this process despite the existence of front rounded vowels. In
Standard Austrian German, as will be shown in 6.2, the application of this process is
restricted to formal speech tasks in strong prosodic positions, a result which challenges
the assumption that this process serves ease of articulation. Therefore, many ways for
treating back rounded vowels in alveolar contexts can be observed cross-linguistically,
and all of them are functional. It is, in any case, the phonology of a language or a
language variety which decides which processes apply, and not the surrounding
segments.
In the framework presented here, inertia, either from the side of the speaker or his
or her speech organs, plays a marginal role. If these assumed antagonistic forces (clarity
vs. ease) were decisive, no systematicity with respect to situational variability would be
found, since any speaker would have different needs as regards his or her “economi-
zation” of speech gestures 10 . Speakers of one and the same social group are, however,
quite consistent as concerns their speech behaviour, their application or suppression of
processes, and their definition of the speech situation. Therefore, the concept of
antagonistic forces is one-dimensional insofar as it does not consider different speaker –
listener constellations, and, consequently, different interactional situations. Speech
10 Since vocal tracts differ individually.
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