Regional Variation and Edges: Glottal Stop Epenthesis and Dissimilation in Standard and Southern Varieties of German

Abstract

Edges of prosodic and morphological constituents often behave differently from non-edge positions, but it is not always clear how such edge-effects are brought about. This paper is a case study of an edge-phenomenon in different varieties of German. Thus, glottal stop epenthesis is limited to edges of morphemes in Southern German, but not in Standard German and insertion of a dissimilatory feature in /sC/ clusters is limited to root edges in Standard German, though not in some Southern varieties. I argue that an analysis in terms of optimality theory (Prince/Smolensky 1993) based on ranked, violable constraints can best account for these facts: high ranking of a constraint banning domain-internal epenthesis (O-Contiguity) with respect to insertion triggering constraints can explain the restriction to edges, low ranking of the same constraint will result in application of epenthesis or dissimilation also inside the specified domain. Moreover, the implementation of the analysis in terms of optimality theory can shed light on this typical pattern of variation among closely related varieties of the same language: the difference between the variety where a process takes place everywhere and the variety where the same process applies only at edges will be analyzed as a minimal difference in faithfulness of the two grammars involved. © 2001, by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. All rights reserved.