Lx I The sounds of German Lecture 7 – Week 9 Stress and intonation in German - suprasegmental...

Lx I The sounds of German

Lecture 7 – Week 9

Stress and intonation in German

- suprasegmental phonology

suprasegmental phonology

• This is just a posh way of saying that we are not looking at features of individual phonemes, but at phonological regularities that affect several phonemes at a time (syllable structure is also an aspect of suprasegmental phonology)

What is stress?Listen to the following:

Sie schrieben ihre Hausaufgaben abends vor dem Fernseher

Can you hear that the underlined words carry stress or emphasis (and that -gab- carries a lesser stress)?

What we hear as stress is a combination of:• greater duration • greater volume; • change in pitch compared to surrounding speech sounds

I. Word-stress•Basic rule for native German words: stress on first syllable: 'Mutter, 'Bahnhof, 'Apfel, 'arbeiten, 'sauer ….*

• *NB we use a raised ' (a straight, vertical dash) before the syllable to indicate that it gets the primary stress

• By the way … this Anfangsbetonung is one of the features that, back ca. 500BC (?), helped make the Germanic languages a separate language family within the Indo-European language family

[Germanic within Indo-European]

b > p labial / lip

d > t dental / tooth

g > k genu / knee

p > f paternal / father

t > th fraternal / brother

k > [x], then h cordial / heart

Another feature distinguishing this group was the Germanic sound shift (or Grimm‘s Law) that only affected the Germanic languages (but not others, like Latin ...) ca. 500 BC

[Germanic within Indo-European]

i.e. all voiced stops become voiceless; all voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives

b > p labial / lip

d > t dental / tooth

g > k genu / knee

p > f paternal / father

t > th fraternal / brother

k > [x], then h cordial / heart

Another feature distinguishing this group was the Germanic sound shift (or Grimm‘s Law) that only affected the Germanic languages (but not others, like Latin ...)

I. Word-stress

• This Anfangsbetonung also explains …

•1. why there are so many weak forms in German, where the ends of words get reduced or lost

•2. why the inflectional endings are so similar (all e, es, er etc…) – they used to be different, but because they were unstressed, they all became reduced, most often with the vowel sound ə

•(in Dutch even more got lost, and in English more still!)

[endings in older forms of German]

• compare Middle High German (1050-1350), where diu and die nom. and acc. fem. were still distinct!)

• or Old High German (750-1050), where verb endings still had full vowels, e.g. horta, hortost, horta = ich hörte, du hörtest, er hörte

Exceptions to Anfangsbetonung

1. inseparable prefixes are unstressed: ver-, er-, zer-, be-, ent-, ge-

• ver'stehen, er'arbeiten, zer'stören, be'einflussen, ent'halten, ge'winnen

• Also for the nouns: Er'holung, Be'deutung, Ver'stand

• but contrast 'Urlaub, 'antworten (where ur- and ant- are cognate with er-, ent- but still take stress)

Prefixes ….

NB …

hinter- is an inseparable verb prefix that is unstressed:

hinter'gehen ('to deceive')

Also in adverbs like hinter'her, hinterein'ander

But in nouns, it is stressed:

der 'Hintergrund

Prefixes ….

Some prefixes may or may not be stressed – when separable, they are stressed; when insep., they are not stressed

'übersetzen – er setzte sie über an das andere Ufer; vs. über'setzen – sie übersetzte den Text

'umgehen – sie gehen um in dem Saal vs. um'gehen – wir um'gehen das Problem

unter'schreiben vs. 'untergehen

'durchsetzen – wir setzten den Plan durch vs. durch'setzen – mit Juwelen durch'setzt

Prefixes …. Miss-

Miss- when added to a simple verb is unstressed:

miss'lingen, miss'brauchen

But added to a verb, noun or adjective that already has a prefix, it IS stressed:

'Missverstehen, 'Misserfolg,

Also:

'missmutig ('sullen')

Prefixes …. un-

Un- is usually stressed : das Unglück, ungenau

But not when the un- word has become lexicalized – i.e. it no longer simply means the opposite of the word without un-, but has another, somewhat different meaning of its own, which you can't guess by adding together un- and the base word

e.g. uner'hört ('outrageous'), un'sagbar ('unspeakable')

Prefixes …. un-

Unstressed or secondary stress only before an insep. prefix: [,]unver'weigerlich, [,]unver'ständlich

NB , (a low straight vertical dash for which I am substituting the comma on these slides) before a syllable indicates a secondary stress.


2.Some native German words are just irregular:

For'elle, Hol'under ('elderberry')

le'bendig, be'hände ('nimble')

So are some native compounds:

Kar'freitag, Grün'donnerstag, zwischen'durch

Including those where the first element is a numeral:

Elf'meterschuss, Drei'zimmerwohnung


3. Borrowed words

Words obviously from French typically take the stress on the final syllable: Restau'rant, Bal'kon, Chau'ffeur (just as in French!)

But so do many others: Pak'et, kon'kret, Kon'takt, Kon'flikt, Pro'test, Pro'dukt, Phon'em

And some place names: Berlin, Schwerin, Sonthofen, Lahausen …

Some take penultimate (second-last) stress:

Analyse, Maschine, Genese


4. Words with the following suffixes, which take the stress (on their first syllable, if there is more than one)

Certain suffixes for describing people

-ant, -ent, -and: Militant, Assistent, alsoTransparent ('banner'), Doktorand(-in)

-ist: Pianist, Linguist(-in), Germanist(-in)

-oge: Biologe


4. Words with the following suffixes, which take the stress (on their first syllable, if there is more than one)

Certain suffixes for describing people

-ant, -ent, -and: Militant, Assistant, also Transparent ('banner'), Ak'zent, Doktorand(-in)

-ist: Pianist, Linguist(-in), Germanist(-in)

-oge: Biologe

NB the case of –or: 'Doktor, but Dok'toren in pl.


4. …

Certain suffixes for forming adjectives and some nouns

-ell: formell, Naturell, aktuell

-al: real, banal, Skandal

-ar, är sekundär; sekundar (= 'secondary' with respect to schools …)

-abel, -ibel: penibel, rentabel ('profitable')

-iv: aggressiv (but 'positiv and 'negativ)


4. …

Certain suffixes for nouns, often abstract nouns

-anz, -enz: Domin'anz, Resi'denz

-tät: Universi'tät, Reali'tät

-ik: Mu'sik, Katho'lik, Poli'tik

[but Gramm'atik, Phon'etik]

-ose: Hypnose

-ismus: Realismus, Naturalismus, Expressionismus

Exceptions to Anfangsbetonung4. …

Certain suffixes for nouns, often abstract nouns …

-tion: Information, Spedition

-ur: Literatur, Architektur

-itis: Bronchitis

-ie: Biolog'ie, Soziologie, Zeremonie, but NB 'Studie

-ade: Parade, the all-important Schokolade

-age: Blamage, Reportage (cf. also in English)

-elle: Frikadelle, Tabelle

Exceptions to Anfangsbetonung4. …

The verb suffix –ieren and all the forms of the verb

stud'ieren, ich stud'iere

resig'nieren, resig'niert

Stress in compoundsBasic principle:

'Primary stress on first element

,secondary stress on other elements, but not in syllable adjacent to primary stress

'Haushalt (not usually 'Haus,halt)

'Sehens,würdigkeiten, 'Wortak'zent

This also applies to verb compounds:

'teilnehmen, 'teilhaben, 'nachvoll,ziehen,

Co-ordinating compounds

In co-ordinating compounds, where the meaning is "both X and Y", both halves of the compound take a primary stress:

e.g.

schwarz-weiß,

rot-grün,

Nordrhein-Westfalen

first elements or prefixoids with intensifying meaning

These also result in two primary stresses:

'stein'reich, 'heil'froh

'stink'sauer

'super'cool

'mords'hungrig

(sometimes elements like super- are called prefixoids because, like "real" prefixes, they are very productive, i.e. can be added to a lot of words, not just the occasional compound)

II. Sentence stress

So far we have talked about stress for individual words, pronounced singly.

Usually, we talk in longer utterances, and do not give equal stress to every word.

• Recall our example sentence

Sie 'schrieben ihre 'Hausauf,gaben 'abends vor dem 'Fernseher

Stress is normally on lexical content words, rather than on grammatical / function words (like pronouns, articles, prepositions …)

Stress-timed languages

• Japanese is a syllable timed language. When he say a word like "katakana", in Japanese each syllable gets equal duration

• German, like English and all (?) European languages, is stress-timed – the stresses in a sentences are roughly equidistant, but there may be none, one or several syllables crammed in between 2 stresses

• Each main stress begins a metrical "foot" (der Takt)

Stress-timed languages and reduction of syllables

Take the sentence which has 3 feet (between | |)

'Heute ,habe ich einen Ter'min um 'elf

|X 1 2 3 4 5 6 |X 1 |X |

You can see that the number of syllables between main stresses varies – those that are unstressed are prone to reduction, as we have seen: 'hɔɪtə hap ɪç n tɛɐ'mi:n ʊm 'ɛlf

(note loss of –e, reduction of einen to syllabic n, some glottal stops missing)

Intonation

•Intonation refers to changes in pitch that we use to help interpret sentence meaning

•(contrast this use of pitch to that in tone languages like Chinese, where a change in pitch on a syllable changes the whole meaning of the word to something else – German does not have tones like this ….)

Intonation

• The phonology of intonation is trickier to pin down than most other rules about the production of language sounds.

• There are certain intonation patterns that are common, but there is a lot of optionality, depending on the type of nuance the speaker wants.

• Still, there are some basic patterns that we can identify …

Intonation

•Just as a phoneme is not realized exactly the same way very time it is pronounced, so the intonation contours we use vary with each utterance …

•We can hear this action by "humming" a sentence:

Was willst du denn hier?

(rise-fall in an exclamation)

Intonation

•We represent different intonation patterns schematically, identifying their most salient features.

In German we have:

• fall \

• rise /

• level --

• rise-fall ^

• fall rise V

The parts of the tone-group

An intonation pattern applies to one tone group at a time. The tone group may be one word, a phrase, or a whole sentence.

The parts of the tone-groupWe can divide a tone group into

1. a nucleus (der Nukleus, die Tonsilbe) the stressed syllable on which, or immediately following which, the most noticeable change in pitch occurs.

•The nucleus is usually the first stressed syllable of the last lexical word in the tone group:

Am 'Donnerstag gehe ich 'ein kaufen

|nucleus|

The parts of the tone-group …

2. A head (or pre-nucleus; der Pränukleus), from the first stressed syllable to the syllables before the nucleus

3. a pre-head = any unstressed syllables before the head

4. a tail = syllables following the nucleus

An example Am 'Donnerstag gehe ich 'ein kaufen


Can you hear the fall \ on the nucleus ein?

• Here the head is relatively high – this is typical of German heads

• Note that the head (beginning with "Donn...") has a slight upward drift; contrast with English, which typically has a slight downward drift.

• Syllables in the pre-head are usually low or mid-pitch

The fall \ Am 'Donnerstag gehe ich 'ein kaufen


•This example illustrates a fall.

•As with all these intonation patterns, a fall can also occur within a single syllable (i.e if there is no following tail):

\Gut

(note that we place the symbol for the intonation pattern before the nucleus – normally it would be in superscript, but this is tricky in Powerpoint, sorry!)

Use of the fall \• Typically for statements, assertions – the "neutral" intonation

• Used in English in a similar way, but the fall is more abrupt /sharper in German, and this is most noticeable where we have just one syllable:

•Contrast: \Gut and \Good

•Also used in commands: Komm \her!

•And in W-questions*: Was \machst du? Wo \bist du?

•(*i.e. Wo, was, wie, wer, wann )

The rise /• Typically used for questions:

Peter kommt /mit ins Theater?

(Contrast fall as statement:

Peter kommt \mit ins Theater.

(shows that intonation does carry meaning in some way!)

NB Like the fall, the rise tends to be sharper in German than in English.

The rise / …• Also used for w-questions, to sound a bit more friendly, polite:

• More polite: Was /machst du? Wo /bist du?

• Contrast the more Neutral w-question:

• Was \machst du? Wo \bist du?

• Expressing surprise, seeking clarification in a question: /Was willst du?

• In non-final tone groups:

• Wenn wir /Zeit haben, …. (eg. As if talking to a child) (more usual would be level, cf. below)

Level intonation --

• A kind of "holding" intonation – tells the listener to expect more …

• Wenn wir --Zeit haben, gehen wir \mit.

• Möchten Sie --Rot- oder \Weißwein?

• --Achtung, --Fertig, \los!

• --Morgen (non-committal!)

•(In English used for non-committal greetings, otherwise not v. common)

Rise-fall ^ Typically expresses enthusiasm, personal involvement:

•Fan^tastisch!

•Ich habe ge^wonnen!

•Wie hast du das bloß ge^schafft?

[harder to hear on one syllable like this! Try humming to hear it]

• Again, the rise-fall is similar to English but tends to be a bit sharper

Fall-rise v

• Typically used to express a contrast, or to give special emphasis

vPeter war in Italien? (und nicht Dieter)

• Also in friendly warnings (eg. As to a child)

vVorsicht!

Avoid … English rise-fall-rise

• /v Sarah? (slightly anxious)

• /v I hope not

• /v she sings well, (but her acting is terrible)

(NB German would instead use lexical means, e.g. modal particles : sie singt zwar \gut, aber …

Lx I The sounds of German Lecture 7 – Week 9 Stress and intonation in German - suprasegmental...

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