Project Details
Projekt
Edge marking in German compounds: Frequency effects and prosodic constituents
Applicant
Professor Dr. Peter Auer
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2006 to 2010
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 25105731
The project aims at investigating the morphological boundary in binary, semantically nonopaque German compounds and particle verbs using methods of acoustic and articulatory phonetics. The general question is whether this morphological boundary maps onto the prosodic boundary between two phonological words; in this case, the phonetic marking of the word¿s edges should be same as at a syntactic boundary. In order to answer this question, compound-internal edges are compared with those at syntactic phrase boundaries under identical conditions of segmental and rhythmical structure. The central hypothesis of the project is that compound-internal edge marking is subject to a frequency effect, i.e. it lessens as a function of the compounds¿s or particle verb¿s token frequency. According to this hypothesis, phonological word boundaries coinciding with morphological boundaries will be less marked in high frequency compounds/particle verbs, while low frequency tokens are marked in the same way as the edges of phonological words at syntactic junctures. Both positive edge markers¿such as glottal stop insertion before vocalic onsets¿and negative edge markers¿such as blocked assimilation and blocked degemination¿will be investigated.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
