Zur sogenannten Vokalopposition im Deutschen

Abstract

Traditional accounts of the German vowel system make a distinction between long (tense) and short (lax) vowels in stressed syllables. This is the so-called vowel opposition. A proper phonological account has to relate a prosodic property (length) to a segmental property (tenseness) and arguably to another prosodic property (stress). Current generative approaches can be shown to fail this task in certain aspects. A different approach is given in so-called syllable cut theories. A recent proposal by Becker (1998) assumes an allophonic variation in unstressed syllables. In stressed syllables, he derives the so-called vowel opposition from a prosodic opposition between a smoothly cut syllable (long vowel) and an abruptly cut syllable (short vowel). This approach, however, suffers a number of drawbacks, too, which are discussed in some detail. In my own account, all occurrences of long/tense vs. short/lax vowels are analysed as allophonic, depending on an underlying prosodic distinction between open syllables (= long, tense variant of the vowel) and closed syllables (= short, lax variant), which holds for stressed and unstressed syllables alike. Thus, in my account there is no need for a specific notion of 'syllable cut'. The facts are easily derived from a rather traditional version of the syllable in terms of a constituent structure, provided the associations between segments, timing slots, and syllable constituents are defined adequately.