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Title:
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Umlaut in Optimality Theory
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Author:
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Thomas Klein
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://personal.georgiasouthern.edu/~tklein
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Delaware
, Department of Linguistics
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Degree Date:
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1995
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Phonology
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Subject Language(s):
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Chamorro
Plautdietsch
Icelandic
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Director(s):
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Irene Vogel
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Abstract:
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Synchronic umlaut in German, Icelandic, and Chamorro is investigated comparatively within Optimality Theory. It is shown that the occurrence of umlaut is unpredictable from the segmental content of its triggering morphemes in the three languages. Consequently, it is argued that floating autosegments trigger umlaut in the three languages. The previously published and the new data presented show that German umlaut does not interact with stress, that Icelandic u-umlaut interacts with non-primary stress, and that Chamorro umlaut interacts with metrical constituency. Umlaut uniformly targets the edges of constituents: German and Icelandic umlaut target the right edge of the root, Chamorro umlaut targets the left edge of the foot.
The interaction between Chamorro stress and umlaut reveals that Chamorro footing is non-iterative in roots, and that stem stress to the left of the main stress is represented by metrical prominence only.
The ANCHOR constraint schema is revised to accommodate floating autosegments and to subsume the functions of Generalized Alignment in Correspondence Theory. The directionality of umlaut is shown to fall out from the interaction of constraints, i.e. without invoking directional algorithms. None of the umlaut and metrical patterns discussed requires cyclicity or lexical strata. Furthermore, it is shown that the interaction between Chamorro stress and umlaut does not require transderivational power beyond two-level Optimality Theory. Feature-to-node spreading is extended to floating autosegments and is integrated as a constraint into Optimality Theory.
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