VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
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173<br />
Vowels in Standard Austrian German<br />
into phonetics, some of them, such as Natural Phonology, incorporate phonetic results.<br />
Keating (1990) made a first step forward by incorporating phonetics into grammar. She<br />
advocates a strict separation of phonology and phonetics, in order to prevent confusion<br />
of the levels:<br />
“Much of the coarticulation literature is confusing on this issue of levels, in that phenomena<br />
that are clearly phonetic are often given (unsatisfactory) phonological treatments. […] The<br />
point is to determine the nature of each case.” (Keating 1990: 453)<br />
Despite this strict introductory separation, it is not quite clear what the phonological and<br />
the phonetic components within her window model should be. The representation of the<br />
phoneme is the window which contains all information necessary to produce a given<br />
output.<br />
“Context, not idealized isolation, is the natural state of segments,…” (Keating 1990: 461)<br />
The window is empirically defined by the minimum and maximum values of a certain<br />
parameter (e.g. velum height, jaw position, or formant frequencies), the actual output is<br />
the path through successive windows, which is defined by the context (e.g. narrow<br />
windows allow less variability, wide windows allow more). Keating does not speak of<br />
rules, but rather it is the path which the articulators have to find through the successive<br />
narrow or wide windows that is responsible for the actual output.<br />
In many ways, Keating’s model is convincing since it can account for much of the<br />
variability observed in actual speech production. The fact that the whole bulk of<br />
variability is stored in the mental representation is no counterargument, in the same way<br />
as economy of storage is no argument either. Nevertheless, some questions remain<br />
open, e.g. how do the different windows defining one specific segment interact and<br />
result in what has been termed motor equivalence (Perkell 1980, Abbs 1986)? And,<br />
finally, given a certain observed output, how is it to be decided whether it belongs to<br />
phonology or to phonetics?<br />
It has already been argued in the previous chapter that much of what has been<br />
called “coarticulation” is in fact governed by processes (e.g. anticipatory velum