Table Of ContentLinguistische
Arbeiten 416
Herausgegeben von Hans Altmann, Peter Blumenthal, Herbert E. Brekle,
Gerhard Heibig, Hans Jürgen Heringer, Heinz Vater und Richard Wiese
Thomas Β. Klein
>Umlaut< in Optimality Theory
A comparative analysis
of German and Chamorro
Max Niemeyer Verlag
Tübingen 2000
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Klein, Thomas B.: »Umlaut« in optimality theory : a comparative analysis of German and Chamorro /
Thomas B. Klein. - Tübingen : Niemeyer, 2000
(Linguistische Arbeiten ; 416)
Zugl.: Newark, Del., Univ. of Delaware, Diss., 1995
ISBN 3-484-30416-2 ISSN 0344-6727
© Max Niemeyer Verlag GmbH, Tübingen 2000
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1. Introduction 1
1.1. Umlaut in a wider perspective 1
1.2. Foundations of Optimality Theory 3
2. German umlaut 7
2.1. Introduction 7
2.2. Morphology and phonology of German umlaut 9
2.2.1. Morphological environments and morphological conditioning 9
2.2.2. Phonological properties 17
2.3. Morphology and phonology of German umlaut in earlier analyses 25
2.4. Featural organization and German umlaut 39
2.4.1. Feature geometry 39
2.4.2. The featural correlate of German umlaut 41
2.5. The morphology of German umlaut: Constraints and Pure Markedness 43
2.5.1. Previous OT approaches to morphological conditioning 43
2.5.2. Morphological conditioning as Pure Markedness 45
2.5.3. Alignment and desiderata in the morphology of German umlaut 49
2.6. An Optimality Theory analysis of the phonology of German umlaut 60
2.6.1. Some basic properties 61
2.6.2. The inertia of schwa and vocalized /R/ 63
2.6.3. Umlaut and rounding assimilation in diphthongs 66
2.6.4. The raising of low vowels 70
2.6.5. Noniterativity and directionality 72
2.7. Summary and conclusion 73
3. Chamorro umlaut 77
3.1. Introduction 77
3.2. Phonology and morphology of umlaut in Chamorro 80
3.2.1. The Chamorro vowel system 80
3.2.2. The segmental and morphological environments of Chamorro umlaut 83
3.2.3. The role of native and nonnative stems in Chamorro umlaut 88
3.2.4. A note on the behavior of adjectives with respect to Chamorro umlaut 89
3.2.5. Stress in Chamorro 90
3.2.6. The relation between umlaut and stress in Chamorro 94
3.3. Previous approaches to the umlaut-stress interaction in Chamorro 97
3.4. Basic properties of Chamorro umlaut in Optimality Theory 101
3.4.1. The featural correlate of Chamorro umlaut 101
3.4.2. Base-initial umlaut and the phonological conditioning of umlaut 103
3.4.3. Morphological conditioning of Chamorro umlaut as Pure Markedness 107
3.5. Chamorro metrical structure and its interaction with umlaut 114
3.5.1. A comparison of Indonesian and Chamorro stress 114
3.5.2. Chamorro foot parsing and the target of umlaut 117
3.5.3. An Optimality Theory analysis of Chamorro stress 118
3.5.4. The interaction of Chamorro umlaut with stress 129
vi
3.6. Noniterativity, directionality and the inertia of umlaut in roots 137
3.7. Summary and conclusion 140
4. Conclusion and outlook 143
References 147
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my family Meta Harris and Mya Green for their patience and support during
the research and writing of this book. They also must be commended for their endurance and
resourcefulness during the field research on Guam and Saipan.
This book is thematically based on Klein (1995). Thus, I would like to thank my origi-
nal readers Irene Vogel, Bill Idsardi, Bill Frawley and Alan Prince.
I have had the great opportunity to conduct field research on the Chamorro language dur-
ing the Summer of 1999. This research was made possible financially by grants from the
British Arts and Humanities Research Board (Research Award MRG-AN5855/APN9404)
and the Research and Graduate Support Unit of the University of Manchester. The support
of these institutions is gratefully acknowledged.
The field research on location on Guam and Saipan was greatly facilitated thanks to many
friendly people at the University of Guam, the Northern Marianas Council for the Humani-
ties, in particular Ron Barrineau, and the Saipan branch of the Pacific Resources for Educa-
tion and Learning center, in particular Jean Olopai.
My particular gratitude to the speakers and scholars of Chamorro who agreed to be inter-
viewed for this study: Genevieve Cabrera, Lorenzo Cabrera, John Cepeda, Maria Fejeran,
Larry Gamboa, Rita Guerrero, Mary Santos Manglona, Peter Onedera, Rosa S. Palomo,
John Perez, Lumin Perez, Edward C. Sabían, Edward John Sabían, Annale Sabían, Carmen
Taimañao, Zita Taitano and one speaker who wishes to remain anonymous. Note that only
a fraction of the data from the fieldwork is reported here. I hope to investigate the data from
this project further in the near future.
Many colleagues have helped through comments and assistance along the way including
Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Wiebke Brockhaus, Katherine Crosswhite, Anthony Grant, Mar-
tin Krämer, Yaron Matras, John Payne, Renate Raffelsiefen and Nigel Vincent. I am grate-
ful to all of them.
Thanks for encouragement to Andreas and June Ryschka and my brother Hans-Dieter
Klein.
A special thank you to Martin Neef, Heinz Vater and Richard Wiese for detailed com-
ments on an earlier version of this book. I wish I had followed their suggestions more
closely. Special thanks to Richard Wiese for being a patient editor and to Carmen Luna at
Niemeyer.
None of the individuals or institutions mentioned above are to be held responsible for
any of the shortcomings of this book.
Thomas B. Klein
Manchester, October 1999
1. Introduction
In the present chapter, some of the salient issues in the morphology and phonology of um-
laut are outlined in cross-linguistic perspective. Furthermore, I sketch some the theoretical
issues to be discussed further in this book and provide some background on Optimality
Theory (OT). However, the present chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive survey of
the issues addressed in this book or a detailed introduction to OT. Thus, I refer readers less
familiar with OT to Sherrard (1997) and Kager (1999) for excellent introductions and over-
views of this framework.
1.1. Umlaut in a wider perspective
The present book is a comparative investigation of umlaut in German and Chamorro in
Optimality Theory. The focus of the present investigation is on the morphology and the
phonology of umlaut as an alternation in present-day Chamorro and modern Standard Ger-
man. The aim of this book is to present a detailed analysis of the morphology and phonol-
ogy of umlaut in these languages the results of which may be usefully applied to similar
phenomena in other languages. Umlaut in the two languages at issue is a synchronic alter-
nation that interacts with the phonology and the morphology in interesting ways. As will
be seen in the course of this book, there are great similarities between umlaut in German
and Chamorro as well as a number of significant differences. Thus, umlaut in these two
languages lends itself particularly well to comparative analysis.
Umlaut is defined as a phonological alternation affecting vowels that is local, nonitera-
tive and directional. Given that umlaut occurs primarily with segmental triggers or certain
affixes, it is local in the sense that there may be no umlautable vowel between the umlaut-
inducing element and the umlauted vowel. In other words, umlaut must not skip an um-
lautable vowel. Umlaut is noniterative in that only one vowel per word is ever affected by
it. Furthermore, umlaut is directional in that it occurs only to one side of umlaut-inducing
elements. Thus, umlaut in German occurs to the left of umlaut-inducing elements, whereas
it occurs to the right of umlaut-inducing elements in Chamorro. Given the architecture of
OT relying on the parallel creation of structure and constraint evaluation, it follows that OT
is nondirectional. Beginning with early works (McCarthy & Prince 1993b, Zoll 1993), the
OT literature has shown that directionality effects in areas such as foot parsing and syllabi-
fication may be accounted for as an epiphenomenon of properly ranked constraints. The
present work confirms this view and shows that the directionality of umlaut falls out from
properly ranked alignment constraints.
The primary phonological correlate of umlaut in German and Chamorro is the fronting
of back vowels. However, I do not interpret fronting as a defining property of umlaut.
Thus, other features, such as vowel color in Icelandic u-umlaut (see Anderson 1992,
Thráinsson 1994 and references cited there, among many others), may exhibit the properties
of umlaut.
2
One of the interesting things about umlaut is that it interacts with segmental, metrical
and morphological structure to varying degrees. In fact, one of the major debates on German
umlaut is to which extent it must be understood as a phonological or morphological phe-
nomenon. In addition, there has been discussion in the literature if German umlaut is sensi-
tive to stress and how it interacts with the rest of the vowel phonology of German. For
Chamorro, many of these issues are understudied to date. However, it is clear that Chamorro
umlaut interacts significantly with stress. In fact, Chung (1983) has claimed that the inter-
action between umlaut and stress in Chamorro necessitates a special type of transderiva-
tional relationship. A considerable part of chapter 3 is designed to show that this is not the
case and that, instead, the interaction between umlaut and stress in Chamorro may be under-
stood better by reference to ordinary types of structure, namely, morphological bases, metri-
cal feet and stress. Chamorro umlaut is clearly phonologically conditioned in that it is regu-
larly induced by overt front vowels. However, the investigation in this book shows that
Chamorro umlaut is to a considerable degree morphologically conditioned. Thus, umlaut is
morphologically conditioned in German and Chamorro. However, German umlaut is not
phonologically conditioned, whereas Chamorro umlaut is to a significant degree phonologi-
cally conditioned. Thus, one of the goals of the analysis to be presented in this book is to
account for the varying degrees of phonological and morphological conditioning found in
German versus Chamorro umlaut. In particular, a new approach to morphological condi-
tioning in OT is developed integrating Representation as Pure Markedness (RPM) (Golston
1996) into two-level OT (McCarthy & Prince 1995).
The domain of umlaut has been the subject of discussion in the previous literature on
German umlaut. Thus, the prosodie word, the metrical foot, the morphological stem and the
root have been proposed as the domain of German umlaut. The comparative perspective
taken in this book is useful in shedding some new light on the domain of umlaut. Thus, it
turns out that the domain of the morphological base captures umlaut in German and a sig-
nificant portion of umlaut in Chamorro and, thus, emerges as the most significant domain
of umlaut in the two languages under discussion.
The recent literature has argued repeatedly that the trigger of German umlaut is an under-
lyingly floating autosegment (Lieber 1987, 1992, Wiese 1987 et seq., Lodge 1989, Yu
1992, Féry 1994, among others). Given that the focus in OT is on constraints and not on
representations, the OT literature is divided on the issue of floating features. Thus, some
writers such as Zoll (1998) have integrated floating features into OT, whereas others have
found arguments against them (Cassimjee & Kisseberth 1997, Cole & Kisseberth 1995,
Rose 1997). My analysis of umlaut in German and Chamorro obviates the need for floating
autosegments, thus lending support to the view that the constraint component of the
grammar may absorb many of the representational distinctions necessary in earlier works.
Researchers have argued that German umlaut is cyclic (Wiese 1996a, b) and that
Chamorro umlaut interacts significantly with cyclic stress (Chung 1983, Halle & Vergnaud
1987). In recent years, a number of approaches have been developed which aim to obviate
(Cole & Coleman 1992) or weaken (Sainz 1992) the phonological cycle. A forteriori from
the perspective of OT, cyclicity is antithetical to the parallel architecture of the grammar
argued for in OT. Thus, arguments for cyclicity pose an inherent challenge to OT, regard-
less of whether they are made within OT (Kenstowicz 1995) or stem from previous genera-
tive analyses. This leads me to focus on the question whether German umlaut and
Chamorro stress and umlaut can be analyzed without the cycle in OT. Significantly, it is
