LINGUIST List 18.925
Tue Mar 27 2007
Diss: Neuroling/Psycholing/Phonology: Scharinger: 'The Representati...'
Editor for this issue: Hunter Lockwood
<hunterlinguistlist.org>
Directory
1. Mathias
Scharinger,
The Representation of Vocalic Features in Vowel Alternations: Phonological, morphological and computational aspects
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Message 1: The Representation of Vocalic Features in Vowel Alternations: Phonological, morphological and computational aspects
Date: 27-Mar-2007
From: Mathias Scharinger <mathias.scharingeruni-konstanz.de>
Subject: The Representation of Vocalic Features in Vowel Alternations: Phonological, morphological and computational aspects
Institution: University of Konstanz
Program: Department of Linguistics
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2006
Author: Mathias Scharinger
Dissertation Title: The Representation of Vocalic Features in Vowel Alternations: Phonological, morphological and computational aspects
Linguistic Field(s):
Neurolinguistics
Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)
German, Standard (deu)
Dissertation Director:
Carsten Eulitz
John Kingston
Aditi Lahiri
Frans Plank
Henning Reetz
Dissertation Abstract:
A pertinacious issue within linguistics is the asymmetry of sound-meaningand meaning-sound relations. One sequence of speech sounds may convey morethan one meaning, and vice versa, one meaning can be expressed by more thanone speech sound sequence.
This dissertation is concerned with a morphophonological asymmetry betweenunderlying representations and surface forms. A case here aremorphophonological vowel alternations, i.e. differing realisations of onevocalic phoneme dependent on the morphosyntactic context in which thecorresponding word occurs. For instance, the vowel in the German noun Vater(father) either surfaces as back (dorsal) vowel [a] or as front (coronal)vowel [e], dependent of whether the noun is used in the singular or in theplural.
A similar diachronic asymmetry, based on vowel height, can be found bycomparing New Zealand English (NZE) and American English (AE). The Englishnoun bat is realised with a mid vowel in NZE, while it has a low vowel in AE.
The following questions arise:-How are vowel alternations and vowel shifts represented in the mental lexicon?
-How do speaker and listener deal with the asymmetries between underlyingand surface forms? In particular, how are alternating or shifted formsperceived and produced?
This thesis provides theoretical and experimental evidence for a featurallyunderspecified representation of vowels in morphophonological stemalternations in German and for a particular vowel inventory in NZE whichemerged as a consequence of language change, describable as a restructuringof contrastive features. The main tenets are that
-the lexical representations themselves determine whether grammatical vowelalternations are possible and
-the lexical representations account for possible diachronic language changes.
The proposed model of speech perception and lexical access therefore coversboth phonological and morphological aspects of lexical organisation andfavours a single route access to all (i.e. complex and simplex) word forms.This access is based on the matching or mismatching of features extractedfrom a particular speech signal and features of word forms stored in themental lexicon.
The dissertation comprises five chapters. The first chapter describes thegrammatical vowel alternations in German and introduces the model whichtries to account for both the synchronic and the diachronic linguisticdata. The second chapter reviews the psycholinguistic literature on speechcomprehension. The third chapter includes a series of behaviouralexperiments, seeking support for the model introduced in chapter 1 whilethe fourth chapter adds neurolinguistic evidence for underspecified vowelsin particular German nouns. The fifth chapter concentrates on a vowelchange in another Germanic language, namely, in New Zealand English, andprovides experimental evidence for a restructured vowel inventory.
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