Phonotactics of dialects in Germany. Investigation of areal diversity on the basis of spoken language

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Alfred Lameli; Professor Dr. Alexander Werth
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 432304149

The comparative description and analysis of the phonotactic structure of dialects is a research desideratum for both the German language and the languages of the world. With the proposed project, which will be located in Freiburg i. Br. and Marburg, we aim at the phonotactic-phonological investigation of dialects in Germany and thus at the areal diversity for a core area of grammar. The project aims to fill two major research gaps, which we localize in the fields of combinatorics of sounds and typicity of sound groups on the one hand and in the field of prosodic structuring of phonological units and rule-bound phonotactic patterns on the other hand. In line with these research gaps, the overall goal of the project is the first documentation and analysis of the phonotactic structure of German dialects on the basis of spoken language. The leading research question is dedicated to the areal dependency. It is: "To what extent are phonotactic structures space-forming for the dialects of German? In order to answer this question, a corpus of approximately 350,000 words based on spoken language is created, which we prepare linguistically in such a way that phonotactic analyses can be carried out at the level of words, syllables, sounds and features. The corpus will be made accessible for research via a database and will be designed in such a way that comparative studies between the greater areas of German dialects will be possible on different linguistic levels. In this way, we want to examine which sound sequences are possible in the dialects and to what extent they differ from sequences of the standard language. It is also necessary to uncover the phonetic-phonological and morphologically motivated principles of order that license the phonotactic possibilities of dialects (e.g. compliance with sonority order, word type restrictions, upper and lower limits of sound clusters). Our project thus becomes a test laboratory for linguistic theories, for example in the field of syllable structure, syllable complexity and prosodic phonology. With this project we open up new empirical territory for central areas of the language system and serve an area-oriented interest in phonology and morpho-phonology as well as a micro-level interest in language typology. At the end of the project, four articles and two monographs on various aspects of dialectal phonotactics will be available.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants