Interaction of phonetics, phonology, and sociophonology – illustrated by the vowels of Standard Austrian German
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2008/02/0044/000103Keywords:
phonetics-phonology interface, vowels, sound changeAbstract
Standard Austrian German, which distinguishes eight front vowels, exploits two front constriction locations for distinguishing these vowels: a pre-palatal and a palatal one. However, the pre-palatal location is acoustically unstable and, consequently, phonologically undesirable. The existence of a sound change which neutralizes the /i/ and /e/ vowels in a first step and shifts the constriction location of the remaining /i/ towards the palatal region in a second step is investigated.
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Copyright (c) 2008 Sylvia Moosmüller (Author)

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Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.