VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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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