Abstract
Words in German show several instances of a seemingly optional schwa-zero alternation, both in relation with inflected forms as well as in the final position of stems and simplex words, as in des Tag(e)s ‘the day, gen. sg.’, or gern(e) ‘gladly’. The present paper proposes that the (non-)appearance of schwa is partially governed by a hitherto unknown prosodic parallelism: the schwa-containing form (a branching trochaic foot) is preferred whenever a neighboring word is of the same trochaic shape; and vice versa: the schwa-less form is found adjacent to another monosyllabic form. In other words, adjacent feet are required to have identical structure, binary branching (bisyllabic) or non-branching (monosyllabic).
Large-scale corpora are used as the main source of evidence for the verification or falsification of the hypothesis. A diverse set of nouns and adverbs involving schwa-zero alternations were studied in appropriate phrasal contexts, both from present-day Standard German and from Early New High German. Based on comprehensive corpus counts, these phrases are tested for the hypothesis of prosodic parallelism. A series of chi square tests and a generalized linear model with mixed effects demonstrate statistically that the prosodic shapes of the target word and its adjacent form are not independent of each other. The focus of the paper is on empirical evidence for Prosodic Parallelism as a new type of prosodic constraint. The relevance of this constraint for the persistence of variation over a long period of time is discussed as well.
©2015 Wiese et al. published by De Gruyter
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