VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...
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227<br />
Vowels in Standard Austrian German<br />
Therefore, rhythmic patterning is not only achieved by an alternating succession<br />
of foregrounding and backgrounding certain phonemes, syllables, or words, but by<br />
additionally grading the amount of foregrounding or backgrounding. This principle of<br />
figure and ground is well embedded in the semiotic model elaborated by Dressler (1980,<br />
1985, 1996, 2002) and has been exemplified by Madelska & Dressler (1996) on Polish<br />
and Czech. The graded foregroundings and backgroundings can be expressed in various<br />
ways, whereby the speaker can make use of the whole speech production apparatus.<br />
This includes both prosodic and segmental features, which, from a production point of<br />
view, cannot be clearly separated (Fant & Kruckenberg 2004: 249). The interplay of<br />
parameters is impressively shown in the multi-parameter analysis of Swedish prosody<br />
performed by Fant & Kruckenberg (2004). Which parameters are enhanced and which<br />
play a secondary role, or whether all parameters are relevant, is language-specific and<br />
speaker-specific.<br />
(Standard Austrian) German is a language which assigns different levels of stress<br />
to units with different importance. It has already been outlined in the previous<br />
subchapters that the production of vowels is affected by both pre-lexical and post-<br />
lexical stress assignment. However, unlike Russian or Bulgarian, German shows no<br />
stress-dependent vowel-quality alternation (Barry & Andreeva 2001). Therefore, with<br />
respect to vowels, the alternating succession of graded foregroundings and<br />
backgroundings is expressed by modifying the degree of constriction, the length of<br />
constriction, the degree of lip protrusion, and the degree of lip aperture, whilst the<br />
location of the constriction stays the same. Again, which parameters are preferred<br />
depends on vowel-type and on the speaker as well.<br />
The interaction of these graded foregroundings and backgroundings and of rhythm<br />
is exemplified for the vowel /A/ 153 in the following sentence:<br />
153 The vowel /a/ has been chosen, because, unlike the other vowels, it is not paired and<br />
therefore more tokens for comparison can be found in a sentence.