Revisiting Pfalz’s law for two Viennese varieties: on speaker group differences in the implementation of vowel+stop sequences

Abstract

In this paper we report on first results from a combined speech production and speech perception experiment conducted within one of Sylvia Moosmüller’s latest research projects – a joint DFG/FWF/SNF-funded so-called D-A-CH project on the synchronic implementation of phonemic vowel and post-vocalic consonant quantity in southern German varieties and potential diachronic changes within these quantity contrasts. While the project investigates a total of six varieties, two each from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, the focus of the present paper is on the two Viennese varieties – the Viennese standard variety and the East Central Bavarian Viennese dialect – which are compared to two varieties from Germany. The project builds among others upon a previous study by Moosmüller and Brandstätter (2014) that suggested the presence of long vowels before
(long) fortis stops in the phonological systems of the two varieties (although differently implemented) despite the prevailing assumption that this combination is illegal in Central Bavarian varieties and merged either with long vowel + lenis stop or with short vowel + fortis stop sequences. The paper specifically extends this previous study by investigating data from two age groups within each variety. Acoustic measurements of vowels and postvocalic stops in the speech materials of the newly collected speech data indeed suggest the emergence of a third category of long vowel + fortis stop sequences. These sequences are acoustically clearly separated from long vowel + lenis stop sequences, on the one hand, and from short vowel + fortis stop combinations, on the other, in all four Viennese groups who implement the contrast differently from German speakers of the German standard variety and a West Central Bavarian dialect. While there was no evidence of a more standard like performance in younger speakers, the separation was less pronounced in Viennese
dialect than in Viennese standard speakers, suggesting the diachronically stable existence of dialectal traces of the Bavarian quantity system particularly in the Viennese dialect and only to a lesser extent in the Viennese standard speakers. All four Austrian speaker groups, however, did not differ from the German standard group in the perceptual categorization of an acoustic continuum from /'haːɡən/ to /'hakən/ encompassing /hˈaːkən/.