CAREER: Mechanisms of Sound Change in Continental West Germanic

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Understanding how and why the sounds of natural languages change over time is a key topic in phonology, the study of sound systems. This project investigates interactions of vowels and consonant voicing (such as voiced 'd' versus voiceless 't'). In English, for instance, vowels before voiced consonants (e.g. 'feed') are longer than vowels before voiceless ones (e.g. 'feet'). Despite a long research history, such interactions are still poorly understood. The empirical focus of this project is on two understudied language varieties, Franconian (spoken in parts of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) and Low German (spoken in Northern Germany). In Franconian, vowel-consonant interactions have led to a tone contrast, comparable to Chinese languages; Low German has developed 'extra-long' vowels alongside long and short vowels, which is exceedingly rare across languages. This project will document and explain these developments, with important implications for linguistic typology and the study of cognitive underpinnings of language.The project consists of an empirical, a theoretical, and a typological part. The empirical part investigates how speakers of modern dialects produce and perceive the vowels and consonants. The results form the basis for the theoretical studies. These studies aim to explicate the mechanisms at play and illuminate how understanding them furthers our knowledge of mechanisms of sound change. The typological part of the project relates the empirical and theoretical findings to comparable phenomena in other languages, which will improve our understanding of interactions between vowels and consonant voicing cross-linguistically. The combined empirical, theoretical, and typological studies will help broaden our knowledge of central issues that are at the heart of current debates in the field of phonology, viz. the structure of phonological representations, the interaction of such representations with the production and perception of phonological contrasts (phonetics), and the role of sound change in shaping phonological systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.