Quantity and Prosodic Asymmetries in Alemannic: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives (review)

The Thurgovian dialect of Swiss German is apparently unique among the Germanic languages in having initial geminates, and accounting for these geminates from phonological, phonetic, and diachronic perspectives is certainly a desideratum. This volume, a revised version of a 2001 Konstanz dissertation, offers just such an account.

After a brief preface (ix–xi), the ‘Introduction’ (1–8) discusses the position of Thurgovian within the Germanic language family (it is a High Alemannic dialect of German) and then presents three goals of the study: (i) to show ‘causal relationships in the historical development’ and to explain ‘why the present system is as it is’ (4), (ii) to ‘show the interplay between the phonological and phonetic sides of the consonant system’ (6), and (iii) to test more general questions of phonological theory, specifically the representation of geminates, against the Thurgovian data.

Ch. 1, ‘Theoretical background and assumptions’ (9–40), lays the theoretical groundwork for the study. Issues discussed here include the prosodic hierarchy and prosodic licensing; there is also a very thorough and useful review of proposals about the representation of geminates. Ch. 2, ‘The synchronic sound system of Thurgovian’ (41–55), discusses the phoneme inventory of Thurgovian, noting, among other things, that quantity contrasts exist in all positions, including word-initially for stops, and medially and finally for fricatives and sonorants. Ch. 3, ‘The Germanic legacy’ (57–95), discusses the diachronic development of the Thurgovian system. Here Kraehenmann proposes that the incorporation of loan words was particularly important to the development of the geminate-singleton contrast found in Thurgovian. Developments in vowel length, with an emphasis on open syllable lengthening, in Thurgovian are contrasted with those found in Standard Dutch and German, as well as the Grison dialect of Swiss German. Ch. 4, ‘Geminates: Phonetic evidence’ (97–168), turns to the phonetic evidence. K first reviews the relevant literature and then discusses a production study she conducted in which four male native speakers of Thurgovian, ranging in age from 25 to 70, read aloud a list of 213 morphologically simplex words covering all the possible consonant quantity contrasts. Most of the chapter is concerned with explicating the data gathered in this study. Some of K’s conclusions include the following: there is a direct relationship between phonological quantity and phonetic sound duration, the contrast correlates phonetically to closure duration for the stops and segment duration for fricatives and sonorants, and there is no correlation between vowel length and consonant length. Ch. 5, ‘Weight and stress patterns’ (169–217), concentrates on syllable weight and stress assignment in Thurgovian. K argues that coda consonants do not count for syllable weight and that moraic theory cannot fully account for the Thurgovian data, because weight and length are not the same thing in Thurgovian, but they are represented by the same unit in moraic theory. The brief ‘Conclusion’ (219–24) summarizes K’s findings and points to some issues that require further research.

In sum, the book is very nicely done. It is thorough, carefully argued, and well-written. It will be of interest and value for those interested in German phonology, phonetics, historical linguistics, and dialectology.