Umlaut and Inflection in German

The present paper examines the prosodic constituent Foot as the domain of phonological phenomena in German. Several processes take place in this constituent, such as Glottal Stop Insertion and Final Devoicing, as well as the phenomena that are described below: productive umlaut and infinitive inflection. The status of the trochaic Foot as the unmarked constituent in German is also discussed. The framework used here is Optimality Theory (OT) as developed in a series of recent papers by Prince, Smolensky and 1994a, 1994b). OT considers grammars as sets of violable and ranked universal constraints; for more information on the framework, I must refer the reader to the above-mentioned papers. German is a language with a rich morphology and peripheral affixation but few sandhi-rules and a poor inventory of segmental alternations. However, the interaction between morphology and prosody is not uninteresting. It will be proposed that the trochaic Foot is the preferred prosodic unit in German, being formed whenever possible. Stems are often trochaic in German: they are either monosyllabic and bimoraic (Heu 'hay', Müll 'garbage', froh 'happy') or bisyllabic with a weak second syllable (Lampe 'lamp', Fenster 'window'). In tri-and quadrisyllabic words, the last Foot is generally trochaic. 2 In most cases, derivation and inflection add a single unstressed syllable, the unmarked result of which is a syllabic trochee.