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Perceptual salience and analogical change: evidence from vowel lengthening in modern Swiss German dialects

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Carol Chapman
Carol Chapman
Affiliation:
Department of German Studies, Old Library Building, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Newcastle-upon-Tyne NE1 7RU, UK. E-mail:carol.chapman@ncl.ac.uk
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Abstract

In the light of current morphological theory, this paper examines the analogical levelling of long/short vowel oppositions in certain inflectional and derivational alternations in a number of modern Swiss German dialects. The regular occurrence of levelling is shown to depend on the extent to which the alternation in question is ‘perceptually salient’ (Chapman 1994). That is, if the semantic relation between base and derivative is transparent and the derivative is uniformly marked, analogical levelling occurs regularly. On the basis of this evidence it is argued that all morphological alternations, both inflectional and derivational, are listed in the lexicon and that each one is assigned a different status according to its degree of perceptual salience.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 1 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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