Phonology
Spring 05
SUNY Stony Brook

On Vowel fronting in German

Michael Helten

I. Introduction

Throughout the history of phonology, there have been numerous attempts to explain the phenomenon of vowel fronting in German. Even OT is left with a number of problems when tackling German vowel fronting¹ - because the process seems to originate from around the interface of phonology and morphology; because the phenomenon only seems to behave in more or less generalizable patterns; and because there is a lot of inter-speaker and intraspeaker variation. This paper will start out by describing umlauting and umlaut-triggering conditions in some detail. The description will be followed by a brief overview of the most dominant ideas that had been brought forward in pre-OT literature, and the paper will close with a suggestion of a possible constraint-ranking responsible for umlauting, not forgetting the problems that remain even in an OT-based account.

II. German vowel fronting ¡V the phenomenon

The patterns for which vowels can be fronted in German and which vowels they turn into as a consequence is straight-forward in German: the vowels that can be fronted are the six [back] monophthongs of German, three of them tense, three of them lax, and one back diphthong. In umlaut-triggering conditions, they all turn into their [front] counterpart. An irregularity can be observed in the fronting of /a/ and /a:/, because the vowels they turn into, /./ and /.:/, are not the exact front counterparts, they are higher. This is usually explained by an underspecification of /a/ and /a:/ for [low]. The German vowel inventory also does not feature an /a/. A second irregularity can be observed in the fronting of /a./ which changes both vocalic parts to /.y/. WIESE assumes a case of Rounding Assimilation for the first part of the diphthong, the change from /./ to /y/ is completely regular. German spelling places a diacritic of two dots above the umlauted vowel.

The fronting vowels ²

[...]

Under Umlaut-triggering morphological conditions, the phonological pattern is as follows:

• If it is ‘umlautable’, the rightmost vowel of the stem, and only the rightmost vowel of the stem, will be umlauted.

(1) Motor (motor) .. Motörchen (motor, diminutive) *Mötörchen

• schwa is invisible for this process

(2) Vater (father) .. Väter (fathers) *Vatär, *Vater (fathers)³

There are a number of morphological processes that trigger Umlaut, and even the following list is not exhaustive.

[....]

1 Henceforth ¡¥German vowel fronting¡¦ will be equal to ¡¥umlauting¡¦ or ¡¥Umlaut¡¦ for the sake of brevity

2 changed after BRANDSTÖTTER, p.1

3 there is a ø-plural morpheme in German