Edge marking in German compounds: Frequency effects and prosodic constituents

该项目旨在利用声学和发音语音学的方法研究德语二元、语义不透明的复合词和助动词的形态边界。一般的问题是，这种形态边界是否映射到两个语音单词之间的韵律边界上；在这种情况下，单词边缘的语音标记应该与句法边界相同。为了回答这一问题，本文将复合内边与同一段段和节奏结构条件下的句法短语边界进行了比较。该项目的中心假设是复合内部边缘标记受频率效应的影响，即它作为复合词或微粒动词标记频率的函数而减少。根据这一假设，高频复合词/粒子动词中与形态边界一致的音系词边界标记较少，而低频标记与句法转折处的音系词边缘标记方式相同。积极的边缘标记（如发声前的声门停止插入）和消极的边缘标记（如同化受阻和消音受阻）都将被调查。

The project aims at investigating the morphological boundary in binary, semantically nonopaque German compounds and particle verbs using methods of acoustic and articulatory phonetics. The general question is whether this morphological boundary maps onto the prosodic boundary between two phonological words; in this case, the phonetic marking of the word¿s edges should be same as at a syntactic boundary. In order to answer this question, compound-internal edges are compared with those at syntactic phrase boundaries under identical conditions of segmental and rhythmical structure. The central hypothesis of the project is that compound-internal edge marking is subject to a frequency effect, i.e. it lessens as a function of the compounds¿s or particle verb¿s token frequency. According to this hypothesis, phonological word boundaries coinciding with morphological boundaries will be less marked in high frequency compounds/particle verbs, while low frequency tokens are marked in the same way as the edges of phonological words at syntactic junctures. Both positive edge markers¿such as glottal stop insertion before vocalic onsets¿and negative edge markers¿such as blocked assimilation and blocked degemination¿will be investigated.