2015/01/01 by Richard Wiese, Augustin Speyer
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Linguistic Variation and Morphology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/ling-2015-0011
Abstract Words in German show several instances of a seemingly optional schwa-zero alternation, both in relation with inflected forms as well as in the final position of stems and simplex words, as in Large-scale corpora are used as the main source of evidence for the verification or falsification of the hypothesis. A diverse set of nouns and adverbs involving schwa-zero alternations were studied in appropriate phrasal contexts, both from present-day Standard German and from Early New High German. Based on comprehensive corpus counts, these phrases are tested for the hypothesis of prosodic parallelism. A series of chi square tests and a generalized linear model with mixed effects demonstrate statistically that the prosodic shapes of the target word and its adjacent form are not independent of each other. The focus of the paper is on empirical evidence for