VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Sylvia Moosmüller 8. Summary and Outlook Approximately 11.000 vowels of six speakers of Standard Austrian German were analysed in two speaking tasks (reading sentences and spontaneous speech). Two speakers additionally read a list of logatomes. The vowels have been segmented manually, and F1, F2, F3, F0, and duration (in number of periods) have been calculated and submitted to statistical analysis. Each speaker has been discussed separately. The acoustic analysis proved that the vowels of Standard Austrian German are located at five constriction locations: pre-palatal, palatal, velar, upper pharyngeal, and lower pharyngeal. Except for the pharyngeal vowel, each location is further distinguished by two degrees of constriction. The pre-palatal and the palatal vowels are further distinguished by lip protrusion, building a vowel system of thirteen vowels. The vowels are distinguished by the following features: [±constricted], [±open], [±round], [±front], [±lower pharyngeal], [±velar], and [±pre-palatal]. The feature [±open] was added because speaker-specific differences occurred in weak prosodic positions. Some speakers discerned the vowels by degree of openness, others by degree of constriction. Duration did not prove to be discriminatory. The feature [±tense] was abandoned in order to avoid misleading semantic implications which have no articulatory basis. Tendencies towards neutralization could be observed for the vowel pairs /i/-/ç/, /y/-/Y/, and /u/-/ï/. One speaker also neutralized the opposition /e/-/E/ in the unstressed positions of spontaneous speech. The results on F0 did not corroborate the frequently observed correlation of tongue height and F0. The same holds for the correlation of tongue height and duration. It is especially those tendencies towards neutralisation that should be taken note of in further investigations on the vowels of Standard Austrian German. Standard Austrian German stands in strong interaction with the Middle-Bavarian dialects, which do not 244
245 Vowels in Standard Austrian German distinguish their vowels by the feature [±constricted], but rather by the feature [±long] 159 (Dressler/Wodak 1982, Moosmüller 1987). Therefore, a sound change in progress might be at work, changing the vowel qualities of the vowels of Standard Austrian German. This change in quality will affect the feature [±constricted] in the way that the [–constricted] vowels /ç/, /Y/, and /ï/ become [+constricted]. By such a change, not only the vowel system of Standard Austrian German would be reduced, but, concurrently, the pre-palatal constriction location would be given up (as could already be observed for the youngest speaker, sp127). The pre-palatal location is acoustically instable and exploited by only a few languages. Therefore, as soon as a vowel system shrinks, the palatal constriction location suffices for distinguishing the front vowels. Phenomena usually termed as coarticulation, e.g. anticipatory lip protrusion or palatalisation, are found to be processes. In Standard Austrian German, both lip protrusion and palatalisation start at plosive release and do not affect the transconsonantal vowel, as long as the transconsonantal vowel and the plosive are separated by a word boundary. The vowel /i/ causes a palatalisation of the preceding plosive, resulting in a plosive configuration similar to the one observed for Russian palatalised plosives. However, Russian palatalised plosives change the quality of the vowel /i/, whereas in Standard Austrian German, it is the vowel which changes the plosive. Therefore, such phenomena are to be described as processes guided by the phonology of the language. The three places of articulation distinctive for Standard Austrian German plosives (bilabial, alveolar, and velar) could be discriminated via the transition of F2 when the preceding vowel was /A/. F2 transition discriminated the alveolar plosive preceding the vowels /u/ and /o/ from the velar and bilabial plosives. In velar and bilabial contexts, F2 is lower at vowel onset. Preceding the vowel /i/, the bilabial context was discriminated by all speakers, whilst the differentiation of alveolar and velar context was less secure. 159 Whether a feature [±long] is to be assumed for the Viennese dialect, has still to be examined.
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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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5.3. Processes vs. Coarticulation 1
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� F3 shows a high variability in
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c(xmin, xmax) 0.000 0.001 0.002 0.0
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6.2. Undershoot vs. Processes 179 V
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Page 201 and 202: Therefore, it can be observed that
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Page 207 and 208: c(xmin, xmax) 0.00 0.02 0.04 0.06 0
Page 215 and 216: Variability coefficient 40,000 35,0
Page 223 and 224: 6.6.3.4. The vowel /E/ 215 Vowels i
Page 225 and 226: 6.6.3.6. The vowel /u/ 217 Vowels i
Page 239 and 240: z-score 5,00 4,00 3,00 2,00 1,00 0,
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Page 277 and 278: Appendix 269 Vowels in Standard Aus
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