We are happy to announce a talk by Felicitas Kleber in the Phonology Colloquium.
Room: IG 4.301
Date: Wednesday December 3rd
Time: 16-18 ct.
Title: Acoustic cue reweighting in diachronic sound change
Many diachronic sound changes are characterized by minimal changes at the subphonemic level and
a slow, gradual progression throughout the speech communities. While generational vocalic changes
along one articulatory-acoustic dimension (e.g. back vowel fronting and F2 raising) are well
documented in the sociolinguistic literature, the reweighting of multiple subphonemic cues to
consonants has only recently become the focus of laboratory phonological studies, e.g. on
tonogenesis in Afrikaans and Korean where VOT is giving way to tonal contrasts. This talk focusses on
the emergence of VOT as a cue to the voicing contrast in German regional varieties that were hitherto
either signalled by closure duration alone or considered neutralized. These changes are very likely the
result of dialect levelling, i.e. they come about through contact with standard German where VOT is
the primary cue to this contrast. They nevertheless offer insights into the mechanisms and
trajectories of group level sound changes. It will be shown that closure duration, VOT and contextual
f0 change non-linearily and that the spread of these changes is affected by place of articulation,
phonotactics, and lexical item, but neither by speech rate nor lexical frequency.