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Voicing distinctions in the Dutch-German dialect continuum
Abstract
This study investigates the phonetics and phonology of voicing distinctions in the Dutch-German dialect continuum, which forms a transition zone between voicing and aspiration systems. Two phonological approaches to represent this contrast exist in the literature: a [±voice] approach and Laryngeal Realism. The implementation of the change between the two language types in the transition zone will provide new insights in the nature of the phonological representation of the contrast. In this paper I will locate the transition zone by looking at phonetic overlap between VOT values of fortis and lenis plosives, and I will compare the two phonological approaches, showing that both face analytical problems as they cannot explain the variation observed in word-initial plosives and plosive clusters.
... Finally, Section 5 concludes. Ouddeken (2016) reports the results of a study carried out on VOT values in the varieties spoken in the Dutch-German dialect continuum, which proves to be an ideal testing ground for accent contact since in these regions both types of laryngeal system are present in such a way that the standard language is Dutch (a voice language) for some speakers, and German (an aspiration system) for others. Ouddeken presents VOT measurements of word-initial plosives on the one hand, and percentages of voicing during closure in plosive clusters (i.e., in the assimilation context) on the other, with data retrieved from different databases. ...
... In contrast, it has been stressed above that the geographical distribution of laryngeally deviant accents of English in the linguistic north is not considered accidental at all: they are all located in the transition zone between Scots-speaking regions and the GE-speaking rest of England. In a sense, their emergence should not be surprising since, as Ouddeken (2016) demonstrates, hybrid systems naturally arise under laryngeal contact -even though for historical and political reasons, the Scots-English dialect/language continuum does not exhibit the usual form of gradual transition in every aspect. ...
A parallel is drawn between the northernmost regions of England represented by Durham and Yorkshire and the transition zone Ouddeken (2016) identifies between voicing and aspiration languages in the Dutch-German dialect continuum. It is argued that, owing to historical changes and dialect contact, the Northern Englishes discussed exhibit hybrid laryngeal systems as a result of being geographically intermediate between Scots in Scotland, which is a voice language similar to Dutch, and mainstream varieties of English spoken more to the south in England (and in most of the rest of the English-speaking world), which are aspiration systems of the German type. We model the emergence of laryngeal systems as the setting of three parameters: (i) whether the laryngeally marked/specified obstruent series contains [voice] (L-system) or [asp] (H-system); (ii) whether the laryngeal prime is able to spread (right-to-left); and (iii) whether the system has pre-obstruent delaryngealisation (POD) (due to which in C1C2, C1 becomes unmarked/underspecified). While spreading L with POD derives voice languages and non-spreading H with no POD derives aspiration languages, two mixed combinations derive the intermediate categories of Durham and Yorkshire (spreading L & no POD and spreading H & no POD, respectively). We also show that all remaining combinations are attested cross-linguistically or else theoretically uninterpretable.
... A third one produced voicing only for [b] (that voicing is more naturally trigged for [b] is also attested in Ouddeken's, 2016, figures 2, 3, 9, and 10). Ouddeken (2016) analysed data from different databases, none of them refers to Standard German, but to the northern "dialects". Standard German has replaced to a large extent all varieties of the autochthonous language: Low German. ...
Awarded with the Werner-Kraus prize by the German Association of Hispanists.
http://hispanistica.de/werner-krauss-preis/preistraegerinnen-2021/
The aim of this study was the investigate both the acoustic differences and the global accent ratings of different types of bilinguals. The 40 speakers who participated in the study were divided into five groups (8 members per group). There were two groups of monolinguals (Spanish and German), one group of L1 Spanish – L2 German proficient late bilinguals, and two groups or early bilinguals (most of them also simultaneous bilinguals). For one group of the early bilinguals, Spanish was the societal language during childhood and German the heritage language, whereas the other group was brought up in Germany and acquired Spanish at home.
The study combines the use of global accent ratings, as typically done in bilingualism studies (e.g. Flege et al., 1995; or Oyama, 1976), with linguistic (acoustic) analyses, as proposed in Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam (2009). The acoustic studies focus on segmental phonetics, namely different aspects of vowels, stops, fricatives, and rhotics were investigated, which cover more than 75% of the segments of each language. Lastly, the study evaluated the impact of each of these phonetic features in the global accent ratings.
The findings support the idea that early exposure to a language does not guarantee a native-like pronunciation (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2009), as only half of the early bilinguals passed for natives in their heritage language despite presenting few phonetic deviations from monolingual norm. On the contrary, all of them passed for natives in their societal language. In turn, the late bilinguals were very far from monolinguals in the global accent ratings and, to a lesser extent, in the acoustic studies. The evaluation of the impact of each phonetic feature on global accent ratings seemingly suggests that other aspects (most likely intonation) can better account for global accent ratings when the speakers evaluated are highly proficient.
Keywords: early bilinguals, late bilinguals, simultaneous bilinguals, heritage-language speakers, Spanish, German, vowels, stops, fricatives, rhotics, and global accent.
Pomerano is a scarcely researched variety of Low German, which was brought to Southern Brazil by large groups of immigrants from former Pomerania in the 1850s. Today, the language is still used in situations of informal communication in the respective communities, along with the majority language, Brazilian Portuguese (BP). The long-lasting contact between Pomerano and BP has left several traces in both languages at all linguistic levels, including segmental phonology. Our study examines the Voice Onset Time (VOT) patterns of stop consonants in the two languages spoken by bilinguals. Control data gathered from monolingually raised speakers of BP are taken into account. The language pair under investigation displays the typical Germanic vs. Romance contrast, in that the phonological fortis-lenis opposition is phonetically realized by means of a long vs. short lag distinction in Pomerano, whereas BP exhibits a voicing lead for the lenis stops and a short lag for their fortis counterparts. Based on production data collected using a picture naming task in Pomerode (Santa Catarina, Brazil), it is shown that both elderly and younger speakers show the expected Germanic contrast in Pomerano. Regarding BP, the monolingual speakers present the typical Romance contrast, while the younger bilinguals display a mixed system in that they pre-voice /b d ɡ/, but aspirate the voiceless stops. The older bilinguals, finally, use the same Germanic contrast in both of their languages, thus showing massive transfer from Pom-erano to BP. Referring to Labov's concept of overt vs. covert prestige, we argue that the latter, as becomes manifest in the stressing of a 'Germanic' feature of pronunciation, operates within both generations, although its effect can be felt with less intensity among the younger bilinguals.
This paper argues for a more structured view of the relation between the phonological feature [voice] and its specific phonetic implementations. Under the theory of universal phonetics proposed here, the implementation of [voice] is sharply constrained: the opposition is defined relatively, as more or less voicing, along a dimension consisting of exactly three discrete, ordered categories, which can be shown to have clear articulatory and acoustic bases. While the phonological feature allows certain rule equivalences across languages to be expressed, the phonetic categories describe possible contrasts within languages, and express markedness relations.
This article provides empirical evidence against the claims that [voice] is a privative feature and that word-internal devoicing can occur in a language without word-final devoicing. The study of voice patterns in a number of languages shows that the feature value [ - voice] although it is the unmarked value of the laryngeal feature [voice], can be active phonologically in a fashion parallel to the marked value [ - voice]. Across languages, voice assimilation may occur independently of devoicing and, although it normally affects both [ + voice] and [ - voice], it may affect only one value in some languages.
The present paper presents some data on voicing (3.1), duration (3.2), intra-oral air pressure (3.3), airflow (3.4), subglottal pressure (3.5), and lip pressure (3.6) of German stops and affricates. On the basis of these data the last section discusses some more general problems, viz. the features distinguishing ptk and bdg (4.1), the reduction of aspiration after s (4.2), the distinction between stops and affricates (4.3), differences due to place of articulation (4.4), "heightened subglottal pressure" (4.5), and the relation between air pressure and airflow (4.6).
It is well known that German utterance-initial lenis stops are voiceless but that German intervocalic (or intersonorant) lenis stops are sometimes produced with voicing. This variable voicing can be understood as passive voicing, voicing that results because of the voiced context, rather than from active voicing gestures by speakers. Thus, speakers are not actively aiming to voice intervocalic stops, just as they are not actively aiming to voice utterance-initial stops (Jessen & Ringen 2002, Jessen 2004). If this is correct, the variable voicing that occurs in aspirating languages should be different from the voicing that occurs in true voice languages (such as Russian), in which speakers are actively aiming to voice both initial and intervocalic lenis stops. Since there is little data on the relative amount of intervocalic voicing in true voice languages, however, it has been difficult to evaluate this prediction. The purpose of this paper is to compare data on the voicing of intervocalic stops in German and English with data on the voicing of intervocalic stops in true voice languages. We find that the differences are substantial, supporting the claim that aspirating languages are not like true voice languages, in which the feature of contrast is [voice].
Previous research has found asymmetric effects of speaking rate on VOT cross-linguistically: as rate slows, long-lag VOTs and negative VOTs increase, but short-lag VOTs remain essentially unchanged. If we assume, as have many phonologists, that the two-way contrast in voicing languages (e.g. French) is [voice] vs. [Ø] and in aspirating languages (e.g. English) is [spread glottis] vs. [Ø], then it appears that at slower rates, a phonological contrast is heightened by selective increase in the phonetic cue for the specified feature. Thus, slowing down causes longer aspiration in aspirating languages and longer prevoicing in voicing languages but no change in short-lag stops. We report the results of an experiment on Central Standard Swedish stops designed to investigate the effect of speaking rate on VOT. CS Swedish uses both prevoiced and aspirated stops in utterance-initial position, hence the phonological feature(s) involved in this contrast is not clear. We found that both prevoicing and aspiration increase in slow speech in Swedish. This suggests that both [voice] and [spread glottis] are the specified features of phonological contrast in CS Swedish, and in turn raises questions about whether phonological specification more generally is economical. Moreover, the fact that speaking rate affects VOT even in situations like CS Swedish in which the phonological contrast is over-specified suggests that such modification is largely due to production dynamics, not speakers’ sensitivity to listeners’ needs.
The phonetic gesture of stop consonant aspiration, which is predictable in a Germanic language such as English, has been described traditionally as ranging from a ‘puff of air’ upon release of closure (Heffner 1950) to the segmental occurrence of a following voiceless glottal approximant /h/ (Trager & Smith 1951). Within the generative phonology paradigm, however, aspiration has been construed as a featural property rather than as an independent segment of its own, often casually identified simply as [+aspiration], or, following Chomsky & Halle (1968), as a positive specification resulting from ‘heightened subglottal pressure’. We take this kind of view here as well, employing a notation with superscript h ([Ch]) to indicate representations in which aspiration is encoded as an integral feature of the segment with which it is associated, while we explore the phonological realisation of aspiration in Germanic as the reflex manifestation of a spread or open glottis, an idea first advanced in the seminal work of Kim (1970), and since developed in Anderson & Ewen's treatment of ‘|O| languages’ (1987: 195–199)
It is well known that initially and when preceded by a word that ends with a voiceless sound,
German so-called ‘voiced’ stops are usually voiceless, that intervocalically both
voiced and voiceless stops occur and that syllable-final (obstruent) stops are voiceless.
Such a distribution is consistent with an analysis in which the contrast is one of [voice]
and syllable-final stops are devoiced. It is also consistent with the view that in German
the contrast is between stops that are [spread glottis] and those that are not.
On such a view, the intervocalic voiced stops arise because of passive voicing of the
non-[spread glottis] stops. The purpose of this paper is to present experimental
results that support the view that German has underlying [spread glottis] stops,
not [voice] stops.
Much theoretical phonology in the 1990s has focused on the characterization of "voicing" assimilations, nearly always assuming presence of the feature [voice] versus its absence in order to distinguish voiced obstruents from voiceless. While [voice] is uncontestably at play in Romance and Slavic, as well as in many other languages, we show here that laryngeal assimilations in German and English provide evidence for positing instead the feature [spread glottis] as the phonologically relevant privative feature. The description of German and English laryngeal patterns in terms of [spread glottis] also simplifies our understanding of German final fortition (Auslautverhärtung) and related phenomena.
Three experiments investigated the voicing distinction in Dutch initial labial and alveolar plosives. The difference between voiced and voiceless Dutch plosives is generally described in terms of the presence or absence of prevoicing (negative voice onset time). Experiment 1 showed, however, that prevoicing was absent in 25% of voiced plosive productions across 10 speakers. The production of prevoicing was influenced by place of articulation of the plosive, by whether the plosive occurred in a consonant cluster or not, and by speaker sex. Experiment 2 was a detailed acoustic analysis of the voicing distinction, which identified several acoustic correlates of voicing. Prevoicing appeared to be by far the best predictor. Perceptual classification data revealed that prevoicing was indeed the strongest cue that listeners use when classifying plosives as voiced or voiceless. In the cases where prevoicing was absent, other acoustic cues influenced classification, such that some of these tokens were still perceived as being voiced. These secondary cues were different for the two places of articulation. We discuss the paradox raised by these findings: although prevoicing is the most reliable cue to the voicing distinction for listeners, it is not reliably produced by speakers.
Zur regionalen Distribution van VOT im Deutschen
- Braun