Renate Raffelsiefen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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Papers by Renate Raffelsiefen

L'article est consacre a l'etude de la stabilite semantique des mots ayant une etymologie... more L'article est consacre a l'etude de la stabilite semantique des mots ayant une etymologie commune. L'A. propose un modele de reconnaissance de mots a partir de la base lexicale selon des principes phonologiques et non morphologiques. Le but de l'etude est de predire les conditions dans lesquelles une paire de mots gardent un lien semantique stable, et d'expliquer la possibilite intuitive qu'ont les auditeurs de langue maternelle anglaise d'apprecier les liens de parente entre les mots

Perhaps the biggest challenge in derivational morphology is to reconcile morphological idiosyncra... more Perhaps the biggest challenge in derivational morphology is to reconcile morphological idiosyncrasy with semantic regularity. How can it be explained that words with dead affixes and irregulär allomorphy can nonetheless exhibit straightforward and stable semantic relations to their etymological bases (cf. strength ‘property of being strong’, obedience ‘act of obeying’, ‘property of being obedient’)? Theories based on the idea of capturing regularity in terms of synthetic rules for building up complex words out of morphemes along with rules for interpreting such structures in a compositional fashion have not made - and arguably cannot make - sense of this phenomenon. Taking the perspective of the learner in acquisition, I propose an alternative approach to meaning assignment based, not on syntagmatic relations among their constituent morphemes, but on paradigmatic relations between whole words. This approach not only explains the conditions under which meaning relations between words...

Yearbook of Morphology 1998, 1999

Grammatiktheorie und Empirie in der germanistischen Linguistik, Jul 9, 2018

Symbolische Repräsentation sprachlicher Lautstruktur beinhaltet die Zergliederung kontinuierliche... more Symbolische Repräsentation sprachlicher Lautstruktur beinhaltet die Zergliederung kontinuierlicher Rede in diskrete Einheiten, die mit einem finiten Inventar von Zeichen assoziiert werden. Die Grundidee hinter dieser Abstraktion ist, "wiederkehrendes" Material, das trotz phonetischer Unterschiede als gleich aufgefasst wird, mit jeweils gleichen Zeichen zu assoziieren. Die Entwicklung geeigneter Verfahren zur Ermittlung einheitlicher und empirisch adäquater Abstraktionsgrade wurde in strukturalistischen Arbeiten vehement diskutiert, scheint aber allgemein seltsam vernachlässigt. In vorliegendem Beitrag wird ein solches im Rahmen der Optimalitätstheorie entwickeltes Verfahren anhand der sogenannten Vokalopposition im Deutschen vorgestellt. Verschiedene Typen konvergierender empirischer Evidenz untermauern die Annahme einer einzigen phonologisch relevanten Abstraktionsebene mit fünfzehn qualitativ unterschiedlichen Vollvokalen.

Paradigms in Phonological Theory, 2004

Phonology, 2004

In this paper I explore the theoretical significance of phonologically conditioned gaps in word f... more In this paper I explore the theoretical significance of phonologically conditioned gaps in word formation. The data support the original approach to gaps in Optimality Theory proposed by Prince & Smolensky (1993), which crucially involves MPARSE as a ranked and violable constraint. The alternative CONTROL model proposed by Orgun & Sprouse (1999) is found to be inadequate because of lost generalisations and technical flaws. It is shown that a careful distinction between various morphophonological effects (e.g. paradigm uniformity effects, phonological repair and ‘stem selection’) is necessary to shed light on the morphology–phonology interface. The data investigated here support affix-specific constraint rankings, but argue against any stratal organisation of morphology.

Language Science Press, Oct 18, 2021

In most grammatical models, hierarchical structuring and dependencies are considered as central f... more In most grammatical models, hierarchical structuring and dependencies are considered as central features of grammatical structures, an idea which is usually captured by the notion of “head” or “headedness”. While in most models, this notion is more or less taken for granted, there is still much disagreement as to the precise properties of grammatical heads and the theoretical implications that arise of these properties. Moreover, there are quite a few linguistic structures that pose considerable challenges to the notion of “headedness”.Linking to the seminal discussions led in Zwicky (1985) and Corbett, Fraser, & Mc-Glashan (1993), this volume intends to look more closely upon phenomena that are considered problematic for an analysis in terms of grammatical heads. The aim of this book is to approach the concept of “headedness” from its margins. Thus, central questions of the volume relate to the nature of heads and the distinction between headed and non-headed structures, to the process of gaining and losing head status, and to the thought-provoking question as to whether grammar theory could do without heads at all.The contributions in this volume provide new empirical findings bearing on phenomena that challenge the conception of grammatical heads and/or discuss the notion of head/headedness and its consequences for grammatical theory in a more abstract way. The collected papers view the topic from diverse theoretical perspectives (among others HPSG, Generative Syntax, Optimality Theory) and different empirical angles, covering typological and corpus-linguistic accounts, with a focus on data from German

Principles of Change in Phonology and Morphology

(6) Co d a Vo i c e (preliminary version) Voiced obstruents in coda position are prohibited.

Der Begriff Wortprosodie bezeichnet hier die Organisation von Segmenten in die hierarchisch geord... more Der Begriff Wortprosodie bezeichnet hier die Organisation von Segmenten in die hierarchisch geordneten Konstituenten Silbe, Fus und phonologisches Wort. Evidenz fur solch eine Organisation und die ihr zugrundeliegenden Regeln findet sich in gewissen distributioneilen sowie phonetischen Besonderheiten von Segmenten. In diesem Beitrag versuche ich eine Darstellung der wesentlichen Zuge der deutschen Wortprosodie als Interaktion miteinander in Konflikt stehender Beschrankungen im Sinne der Optimalitatstheorie. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Herausarbeitung unmarkierter prosodischer Strukturen auf der phonologisch-lexikalischen Ebene, da unmarkierte Strukturen einen wichtigen Bezugspunkt fur die Beurteilung von Varianten bilden. Zugleich ergibt sich eine neue Perspektive auf das Verhaltnis von Norm und Regel.

A central concern of linguistic phonetics is to define criteria for determining the phonological ... more A central concern of linguistic phonetics is to define criteria for determining the phonological status of sounds or sound properties observed in phonetic surface form. Based on acoustic measurements we show that the occurrence of syllabic sonorants vs. schwa-sonorant sequences in German is determined exclusively by segmental and prosodic structure, with no paradigm uniformity effects. We argue that these findings are consistent with a uniform representation of syllabic sonorants as schwa sonorant sequences in the lexicon. The stability of schwa in CVC-suffixes (e.g. the German diminutive suffix -chen), as opposed to its phonetic absence in a segmentally comparable underived context, is argued to be conditioned by the prosodic organisation of such suffixes external to the phonological word of the stem.

Trubetzkoy's recognition of a delimitative function of phonology, serving to signal boundarie... more Trubetzkoy's recognition of a delimitative function of phonology, serving to signal boundaries between morphological units, is expressed in terms of alignment constraints in Optimality Theory, where the relevant constraints require specific morphological boundaries to coincide with phonological structure (Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939, McCarthy & Prince 1993). The approach pursued in the present article is to investigate the distribution of phonological boundary signals to gain insight into the criteria underlying morphological analysis. The evidence from English and Swedish suggests that necessary and sufficient conditions for word-internal morphological analysis concern the recognizability of head constituents, which include the rightmost members of compounds and head affixes. The claim is that the stability of word-internal boundary effects in historical perspective cannot in general be sufficiently explained in terms of memorization and imitation of phonological word form. Rather, t...

American English and German AI, AU observed in cognates such as Wein, wine, Haus, house are usual... more American English and German AI, AU observed in cognates such as Wein, wine, Haus, house are usually treated on a par, represented with the same initial vowel (cf. [ai], [au] for Am. Engl, and German [1]). Yet, acoustic measurements indicate differences as the relevant trajectories characteristically cross in Am. Engl, but not in German. These data may indicate consistency with the same initial target for these diphthongs in German, supporting the choice of the same Symbol /a/ in phonemic representation, as opposed to distinct targets (and distinct initial phonemes) in American English.

In diesem Beitrag werden drei quantitative Studien vorgestellt, mit deren Hilfe untersucht wird, ... more In diesem Beitrag werden drei quantitative Studien vorgestellt, mit deren Hilfe untersucht wird, ob neben dem robusten Langenunterschied auch Qualitatsunterschiede fur die deutschen -Laute vorhanden sind (z.B. versus ). Auf Basis von ausgewahlten Korpora und instrumentalphonetischen Messungen kann dieser Zusammenhang bestatigt werden. Zudem zeigen sich signifikante Unterschiede in den dynamischen Verlaufen der beiden Vokale.