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Title:
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Lenition in Germanic: Prosodic templates in sound change
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Author:
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David Holsinger
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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University of Wisconsin-Madison
, Department of German
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Degree Date:
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2000
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Historical Linguistics
Phonology
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Language Family(ies):
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Germanic
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Director(s):
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Joseph Salmons
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Abstract:
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Lenition, or consonant weakening, describes a range of phonetically diverse sound changes. Lenition processes attested in West Germanic languages include vocalization, elision, rhotacism, lambdacism, flapping, and spirantization. This dissertation presents a unified phonological analysis of processes affecting consonantal strength, primarily lenition but including some cases of fortition, cast in terms of a prosodic template.
Though the first attestations of many consonantal lenitions in German and Dutch are roughly contemporaneous, consonantal strength processes are found to recur in both space and time rather than deriving from a single historical origin. This thesis argues that the similarities in lenition and fortition patterns across West Germanic originate in prosodic patterns common to all of Germanic, but the phonetic resolution of affected segments varies strongly by dialect.
In a constraint-based phonology, a prosodic template serves to unify constraints on surface structure. As such, it provides a mechanism for explaining both diachronic sound change and synchronic interactions of prosody, morphology, and segmental processes that could not result from the interaction of unrelated constraints on feature distribution or cooccurrence. Usage of the term 'template' implies that underlying phonological structure obligatorily conforms to certain prosodically-formulated restrictions on the surface.
This dissertation argues that in Germanic and a number of other language families, the position of segments and features within a prosodic domain plays a primary role in conditioning both lenition and fortition. Data from German and Dutch dialects demonstrate the roles of both strong and weak positions of the trochaic foot (a sequence of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable) in particular as a licenser of segmental structure. Specific positions within the foot are shown alternately to ban or to attract specific features and feature values. The possibility of unreferenced positions (that is, syllables within a prosodic word that are neither strong nor weak) is explored as well,including evidence that such positions most commonly fail to participate in strength-shifting processes.
Phonological patterns in a variety of languages outside Germanic are shown to follow a templatic distribution. Substantive differences between systems of violable constaints (Optimality Theory) versus inviolable constraints (Declarative Phonology) are explored as alternative explanations. Case studies in the role of the prosodic template in synchronic and diachronic phonological processes include the historical evolution and synchronic status of d-deletion and d-lenition in Dutch (chapter 3) and a templatic analysis of Verner's Law (chapter 5) as well as lenition and fortition processes in a range of Native American langauges.
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