VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Sylvia Moosmüller 6. Vowel and Vowel Variability The discovery of low-level variability as put forward by Menzerath & de Lacerda (1933) and Menzerath (1935) caused some consternation among the then phoneticians, “since it had often been assumed that the same sound would be articulated in the same way irrespective of its context” (Löfqvist 1997: 407). Since then, “the overarching challenge was to explain the strong context-dependence and variability of acoustic phonetic patterns. Major handbooks (Hardcastle & Laver 1997) and review chapters (Farnetani 1997, Farnetani & Recasens 1999, Kent, Adams & Turner 1996, Löfqvist 1997) converge in identifying coarticulation as a major contributor to the mismatch between the dynamic and the linguistic perspectives of speech.” (Lindblom 2004: B-86) The mismatch, however, lies much deeper than in the observation of variability in speech 113 . It lies in the conception of what is part of a grammar and what is not, and it lies in the unfortunate coincidence of the emergence of phonological theories which ascribed phonetic observations to performance and thus considered them irrelevant for linguistic investigation 114 . This incompatibility of phonology within generative frameworks and phonetics led to the strict rejection of phonology in the Eighties (Löfqvist 1986, Fant 1986): “The supposedly happy marriage between phonology and phonetics has its inherent shortcomings and some of us like Peter Ladefoged might argue for a respectful divorce. […] To me, phonetics is the stable partner of the marriage, while phonology is promiscuous in its experimenting with widely different frameworks and choice of features for describing one and the same inherent phenomenon.” (Fant 1986: 481) Up to the present, the situation has not much changed. Mainstream phonological theories like, e.g., Optimality Theory, which incorporate phonetic knowledge and give elegant descriptions, are, however, of little help when addressing the main questions in phonetic theory (see Hurch 1998). While non-mainstream theories are seldom absorbed 113 It strikes as somehow strange to blame an observation for the incompatability between theories or theorists. 114 To name just a few, see Dressler 1984, 1985, 1996, Hurch & Rhodes 1996, Donegan 2002 for a profound critique on phonological theories within generative frameworks. 172
173 Vowels in Standard Austrian German into phonetics, some of them, such as Natural Phonology, incorporate phonetic results. Keating (1990) made a first step forward by incorporating phonetics into grammar. She advocates a strict separation of phonology and phonetics, in order to prevent confusion of the levels: “Much of the coarticulation literature is confusing on this issue of levels, in that phenomena that are clearly phonetic are often given (unsatisfactory) phonological treatments. […] The point is to determine the nature of each case.” (Keating 1990: 453) Despite this strict introductory separation, it is not quite clear what the phonological and the phonetic components within her window model should be. The representation of the phoneme is the window which contains all information necessary to produce a given output. “Context, not idealized isolation, is the natural state of segments,…” (Keating 1990: 461) The window is empirically defined by the minimum and maximum values of a certain parameter (e.g. velum height, jaw position, or formant frequencies), the actual output is the path through successive windows, which is defined by the context (e.g. narrow windows allow less variability, wide windows allow more). Keating does not speak of rules, but rather it is the path which the articulators have to find through the successive narrow or wide windows that is responsible for the actual output. In many ways, Keating’s model is convincing since it can account for much of the variability observed in actual speech production. The fact that the whole bulk of variability is stored in the mental representation is no counterargument, in the same way as economy of storage is no argument either. Nevertheless, some questions remain open, e.g. how do the different windows defining one specific segment interact and result in what has been termed motor equivalence (Perkell 1980, Abbs 1986)? And, finally, given a certain observed output, how is it to be decided whether it belongs to phonology or to phonetics? It has already been argued in the previous chapter that much of what has been called “coarticulation” is in fact governed by processes (e.g. anticipatory velum
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VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN
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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
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1. Introduction: Setting the Theore
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3 Vowels in Standard Austrian Germa
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11 Vowels in Standard Austrian Germ
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Hz 3000 2500 2000 1500 1000 500 0 N
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� Speaker sp127: Student, male, 2
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4. Vowel inventory and features 51
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Spontaneous speech Long vowel + len
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Spontaneous speech Long vowel + len
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Height 0 10 20 30 40 u i o ö ü e
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Vowel category Variability Coeffici
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z-score 5,00 4,00 3,00 2,00 1,00 0,
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Appendix 269 Vowels in Standard Aus
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