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The structure of the German vocabulary: Edge marking of categories and

functional considerations

Article  in  Linguistics · January 2001

DOI: 10.1515/ling.2001.009

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 The structure of the German vocabulary:
edge marking of categories and functional
considerations1
RICHARD WIESE

Abstract

That phonology can signal the boundaries of constituents has been well
known since Trubetzkoy identified the delimitative function of phonology.
In this paper, it is argued that such edge marking may be much more
systematic than observed in earlier work. In particular, the stress domains
(foot, word, compound, phrase) and the morphological categories (root,
stem, word) of German systematize their edge marking by a repeating
alternation in moving from left to right (stress) or by a switch in feature
values for [consonantal] (root, etc.). For the latter preference, quantitative
evidence is provided. Such alternating patterns of edge marking are argued
to be highly functional. Ways of treating these phenomena by means of a
metaconstraint in optimality theory are discussed in the final section.

Introduction: the relevance of the ‘‘delimitative functions’’ or

‘‘boundary signals’’

In the beginning of phonological theorizing, Trubetzkoy expressed the

far-reaching hypothesis that the phonological subsystems of languages
were by no means restricted to a system of phonemic contrasts between
segments. Besides the distinctive function of sounds carried by phonemes,
Trubetzkoy (1967) identified two further functions, which he called
delimitativ and gipfelbildend ‘cumulative’. In this paper, I discuss the
role of the so-called delimitative function in phonology, with the aim of
arguing that it is actually more central than Trubetzkoy could envisage.
Second, a treatment of these regularities in terms of optimality-theoretic
constraints will lead to the conclusion that constraints enter specific
relations with each other, hitherto unnoticed.
The quote in (1) makes it clear that Trubetzkoy, although he clearly
saw the importance of phonological delimitation, still claimed that the

Linguistics 38–6 (2000), 95–115 0024–3949/00/0038–0095

© Walter de Gruyter
96 R. Wiese

distinctive function has priority and is the only one for which a language
has a logical necessity. In other words, phonology is there to distinguish
German Tisch ‘table’ from Fisch ‘fish’. In addition, it may (but need not)
signal where units start and end in a stream of such units.2
(1) Trubetzkoy’s notion of delimitative functions
‘‘Diese zwei Schallfunktionen, die distinktive und die delimitative,
müssen streng unterschieden werden. Die distinktive Funktion
ist für die Sprache als solche unentbehrlich: die einzelnen
Schallkomplexe, die den Bedeutungseinheiten entsprechen, müssen
unbedingt verschieden sein, damit sie nicht verwechselt werden; (...)
Dagegen ist die äußere Abgrenzung der bedeutungsgeladenen
Schallkomplexe gar nicht unbedingt notwendig. Diese Komplexe
können in einem ununterbrochenen Redefluß ohne jede Andeutung
ihrer Grenzen aufeinander folgen’’ ( Trubetzkoy 1967: 241–242).3
In the following, I will try to combine the insight from Trubetzkoyan
phonology with analytical tools provided by optimality theory: linguistic
units may, to a large extent, be signalled by marking their left and/or right
edges. More specifically, it is postulated that roots, stems, and words in
German are much more pervasively signalled by rather concrete phonologi-
cal properties than is generally assumed, even by Trubetzkoy. Furthermore,
when moving from one linguistic level to the next in a hierarchy of linguistic
categories, we often find a switch in the value of the feature under discussion,
the features being segmental and/or prosodic. This observation, if correct,
bears consequences for a theory of constraints, such as optimality theory:
constraints are mutually constrained.
I present two types of evidence for these claims. First, it will be argued
(as in Wiese 2000 [1996 ]: 311) that there is indeed a general pattern such
that linguistic units are consistently marked on the edges, and that the
direction of marking reverses from left to right and back again, when we
go through the relevant hierarchy. This is demonstrated by looking, in
section 1, at the stress patterns of German. Disregarding cases interpreted
as exceptional or marked in the various analyses, the basic generalization
is that the main stress switches in its orientation from one linguistic level to
the next. In the main part of this article, in section 2, I argue that German
roots, stems, and words are surprisingly systematically marked by a contrast
of [consonantal ] vs. its absence at edges of roots, stems, and words.

1. From right to left in stress patterns

German is a stress-timed language, which, even if this classificatory term

has no further function, makes it easy to identify stress patterns at various
 The structure of the German vocabulary 97

linguistic levels. There are numerous studies of stress in German (see the
thorough survey by Jessen 1999), which disagree in many details.
However, it is clear that the units given in (2) are all relevant for the
description of stress. In other words, we need to talk about 
stress, because there is good evidence that it differs systematically from,
say,  stress and  stress.
(2) Stress domains:
Phrase
|
Compound
|
Word
|
Foot
Next, we need to identify the basic stress pattern of the units given in
(2). The generalizations are not always uncontroversial, but in most
cases, a rather clear picture emerges. As shown in (3), German has left-
strong feet, which are sometimes seen as syllabic (Giegerich 1985; Hall
1992; Wiese 2000 [1996 ]), and sometimes as moraic (Alber 1998; Féry
1998). The major point under debate thus is the precise nature of the
foot: the foot is left-strong. Moving up the hierarchy, we find words
consisting of several feet, like those in (3b). It turns out that it is the
final (rightmost) foot in these cases that bears word stress. There are
problematic cases for this analysis, for example in trisyllabic words such
as Sansibar, Talisman, etc., but the generalization still seems to be valid.
It partly explains that word stress is predominantly on the final or the
penultimate syllable, and that word stress is always found on one of the
three final syllables. Strong units are italicized in (3).
Turning to compounds, we find that binary compounds ([A B]) pre-
dominantly have initial stress, again with exceptions for which no com-
pletely satisfactory analysis exists (see, e.g., Giegerich 1985; Benware
1987). Finally, phrases predominantly bear final stress, at least if not
under special focus conditions. The classical stress rules for English, the
compound rule and the nuclear stress rule of SPE (Chomsky and Halle
1968: chapters 2, 3) apply equally well (or badly) to German.4
(3) Stress directionality in German:
a. Feet:
[Häu ser], [Kö nig] (syllables within syllabic feet)
[La ti] [tu di] na [ris] mus (morae within feet)5
98 R. Wiese

b. Words:
[Symme trien], [ Uni versi täten] (feet within [phonological ] words)
c. Compounds:
[Fahr zeug], [Streich holz] (words within compounds)
d. Phrases:
[Ottos Geburtstag], [alte Freunde],
[heute abend ], [auf dem Tisch] (words within phrases)
The crucial and, to my knowledge, new observation here is that stress
alternates between the right and the left edge from one stress unit to the
next higher or lower one, a generalization summarized in (4). This
alternation is completely systematic, only perturbed by the various excep-
tions and provisos mentioned above with respect to the individual stress
patterns.
(4) Accentual units and orientations of main stress:
Phrase  right
|
Compound  left
|
Word  right
|
Foot  left
Stress was discussed by Trubetzkoy as an instance of the ‘‘delimitative
function’’ of phonology. Presupposing stress-relevant structures that are
always or at least preferably binary, stress can only highlight either the
right or the left edge of the domain. If stress is edge-related in this way,
it serves to mark boundaries of units. Consider now a stress system in
which stress for all units is uniform with respect to its left/right orienta-
tion. Such a system would not be very efficient in terms of its delimita-
tional power: edges would be indicated through stress, but there would
be no way of expressing the  of unit whose edge is indicated by
stress. The functional logic of a system such as the German one is now
obvious: in contrast to the hypothetical system just discussed with uni-
form stress marking, the type of unit is in fact quite consistently indicated
through the position of its main stress. If a hearer encounters a linguistic
form of the shape [a B] (with capitalization indicating main stress), she
can conclude that the form is either a phrase or a word, but not a
compound. ( The conclusion may be wrong, but it will constitute a
good guess.)
One might speculate whether the pattern can be extended to lower as
well as higher categories. The next lower category below the word is the
 The structure of the German vocabulary 99

syllable. Remarkably, in an analysis of the syllable using a strong–weak

labelling for its constituents, Kiparsky (1979) assigns to the syllable a
weak–strong pattern, such as [onset –rhyme ] ; see also Giegerich (1985).
w ss
This is once again a switch in direction from the next higher level.
Furthermore, as a reviewer of this paper points out, it is possible to say
that the next higher level from the phrase is the clause (in the sense of
the main verb and its arguments). But it has been well known since
Kiparsky (1966) that the stress pattern of such structures is left-strong,
as in ein Búch lesen ‘read a book’, auf den Tı́sch klopfen ‘knock on the
table’. The issue of stress patterns here is difficult (see Cinque 1993 for a
syntax-oriented approach), but arguably, there is yet another switch in
stress directionality involved here.
The conclusion from these bird’s-eye observations on stress patterns is
that the stress rules of German refer to each other and do not seem to
be independent of each other, although they are always stated in this
way. I am not aware of any analysis claiming that, for example, the
phrasal stress rule puts main stress on the final constituent because the
compound rule behaves in the opposite way.
The term ‘‘stress rule’’ in the preceding paragraphs is intended to be
used in a pretheoretical sense. Stress regularities can be expressed by a
number of different means. Within optimality theory, they are expressed
by means of standard constraints, in particular those that align the
prominent daughters (heads) with the left or right edge of their respective
mother node (see Prince and Smolensky 1993; McCarthy and Prince
1993a, 1993b, and numerous subsequent literature). A description of
German stress by means of constraints is not the topic of the current
paper, but see Alber (1997, 1998) and Féry (1998) for modelling German
word stress in OT. I return to a constraint-based description of edge
marking in section 3 below.
One advantage of using a constraint-based framework for the point
under discussion, namely the switch in left–right orientation over a hier-
archy of categories, may be that this aspect is not mandatory. That is,
the observation made for German is not without counterexamples in
other languages. For Finnish, for example, it seems that both feet and
words are left-strong (see Hanson and Kiparsky 1996; Alber 1997). In
other words, the left-to-right alternation noted for German and argued
to be a highly functional organization of stress patterns is not universal.
In terms of optimality theory, a system of violable constraints may be
responsible for the situation found. At the same time, optimality theory
makes a prediction here: the Finnish-type, one-sided edge marking over
adjacent categories can only arise if enforced by some higher-ranked
constraint. I can only speculate at this point that a preference for a
100 R. Wiese

marking of initial edges is higher than that of marking final edges. The
preference for the marking of left edges (as opposed to right edges) makes
sense in terms of speech processing, which is generally left-to-right.

2. From vowel to consonant in lexical categories

Pursuing the idea that such edge marking of units with a pervasive
reversal of values within a hierarchy is inherent in the linguistic system
(of German), I will, second, argue that other categories are similarly
marked at their edges, and that units that are vertically adjacent in a
hierarchy are marked with the opposite value of some feature. In particu-
lar, I present some results of a study in which roots, stems, and words
are analyzed and their edge marking is under scrutiny. The study presup-
poses an arrangement of these categories as in (5), with recursion allowed
for the stem (see, e.g., Selkirk 1982; McCarthy and Prince 1993a, 1993b).
(5) Morphological categories:
Word
|
Stem
|
Root
A second theoretical background assumption of the study is the proposal
made in direct optimality theory (Golston 1996a) that the representation
of any linguistic unit is identical to the set of constraints it violates; see
(6). According to direct OT, there is no need to see the (partial ) represen-
tation of linguistic units as separate from the set of constraints that are
violated for the particular linguistic unit. In this conception, a particular
constraint may be obeyed by a large number of particular entities, but it
can still be violated by a minority of them, and violations of this con-
straint are part of the phonological representation of each of these entities
(simple or complex).
(6) Direct OT (Golston 1996a):
Morphemes are represented by the constraints they violate.
It turns out that the constraints used in standard OT are so varied and
manifold that violations of them can be used to specify morphemes:
classes of linguistic forms and even individual items can be characterized
as specific sets of constraint violations. This makes standard representa-
tions redundant since constraint violations, which are routinely used to
evaluate forms, can also be drawn upon to represent the very same forms.
 The structure of the German vocabulary 101

This is the central claim of direct OT, one I will make use of in the
following.
Constraints thus penalize lexical items for their violations of particular
edge-marking constraints ( just as for any other violation of constraints).
For present purposes, it is hypothesized that roots are marked by initial
and final consonants. In other words, a root beginning or ending in a
vowel violates an alignment constraint that requires the opposite.
Therefore, such a root (take See ‘sea’) is represented (partially) by this
particular constraint violation; see (7). The display in (7) is nothing but
a specific elaboration of the bipartite Saussurean sign: a combination of
a meaning (abbreviated as SEE) with a form (the constraint violation).
(7) Partial representation for See:

ALIGN-R (root, [cons.])

SEE

2.1. Roots

With this conception of linguistic representation providing the basic

analytical tools, Golston and Wiese (1998) look at the edge marking for
roots in German. On the basis of a computer-readable, independently
derived root dictionary of German (compiled on the basis of the database
of roots by Ortmann [1993] containing 6,512 native roots), they find the
results displayed in (8).
(8) Edge marking of roots (from Golston; Wiese 1998: 178–179):
Consonant Vowel
no. % no. %
Left edge 6147 94 365 6
Right edge 6268 96 244 4
The result of this quantitative survey is that there is a very strong tendency
to mark both edges of a German root by the feature [consonantal ]. That
is, the two constraints ALIGN-L/R (Root, [cons.]) are obeyed by almost
all roots. The minority of roots that violate one of the two constraints are
characterized by exactly this constraint violation and are in this respect
more marked than the unmarked cases (see [9]). Note that only the first
result ( left edge marked by consonants) is possibly reducible to the onset
requirement of syllables, but the second result (consonant at right edge) is
102 R. Wiese

in fact unexpected by syllabic requirements. A typical (and good) root

such as Tisch ‘table’ is a bad syllable in that it is a closed syllable.
Expressed in terms of standard OT constraints, vowel-initial roots are
represented (inter alia) by a violation of (9b), and vowel-final roots by
a violation of (9a). As seen in (8), only a minority of native German
roots incur these constraint violations.
(9) OT constraints for roots (Golston and Wiese 1998):
a. ALIGN-R (root, [cons.])
b. ALIGN-L (root, [cons.])
The tendency to mark root boundaries by a consonant is actually not
restricted to German but is widespread in typologically diverse languages.
It is even found for languages that have a strong preference for open
syllables, as seen in the Indo-European or the Bantu languages. (For
Indo-European roots, see the dictionary by Watkins [1985].) Bantu roots
(radicals) are also predominantly consonant-final (see Meeussen 1967;
de Blois 1975: 72f.), though Bantu syllables strongly prefer to be open.
To take up a completely different language, Olawsky (1999: 95)
presents relevant statistics from the language Dagbani, a Niger-Congo
language spoken in Ghana. Olawsky collected 512 nominal roots of
Dagbani, of which 71% end in a consonant, although the preference for
open syllables is very strong in Dagbani.

2.2. Stems
If roots are marked by [consonantal ], what about stems? Stems dominate
roots but are less easily identified on the basis of a corpus. While roots
are identifiable as some sort of minimal or core morpheme, and while
words are the minimal freely occurring units, no such minimality condi-
tion appears to work for stems, which are intermediate constituents (see
[5]). For current purposes, I therefore rely on existing linguistic descrip-
tions of the stem in general and the stem in German in particular.6
If roots are marked by final consonants, stems should be marked by
nonconsonants, according to the functional considerations of this study.
As a first piece of evidence that this might be the case, I suggest that
theme vowels of many languages are primarily stem markers. Their main
function is to sort the roots of the language into a set of classes in order
to make them available for further derivational and inflectional morphol-
ogy. Thus, Latin and some of the Romance languages display precisely
the edge marking of stems by vowels predicted by the present account.
The main point in the present context is that I am not aware of their
unpredicted counterparts, namely ‘‘theme consonants.’’ But if most lan-
 The structure of the German vocabulary 103

guages have more consonants than vowels, why should these not exist?
The hypothesis that roots tend to end in consonants, while stems tend
to end in vowels, predicts the nonexistence of theme consonants: there is
no functional reason to give stems a consonantal ending. Matters change,
of course, once we are dealing with a more specific inflectional morpheme
carrying other information. In this case, grammarians seem not to use
the term ‘‘theme vowel/consonant.’’
As for German, it is possible to argue that final schwa is a stem marker.
This proposal was first suggested by Wurzel ( l970), who interprets final
schwa in most of its occurrences as a  marker. In (10), the final
subrule is one instance in a complex rule for noun-stem formation. In
other words, noun stems are often marked by the vowel schwa in final
position.7 In a way, final schwa is a theme vowel, assigning a substantial
number of German nominal roots to a particular inflectional class. The
linguistic analysis of words such as Glaub-e ‘belief ’, Lieb-e ‘love’, Ros-e
‘rose’, Lüg-e ‘lie’ would thus be that they contain a root (consonant-
final!) plus a stem-marker schwa, to the effect that these words constitute
a noun class. Other stems (not in this class) are identical to roots and
thus violate a constraint requiring a stem to end in a vowel. The first
two subrules in (10) are further stem-formation rules, regulating more
specific noun classes (with fewer members). Clearly, the schwa-insertion
rule in the final line is the default rule with respect to the two preceding
ones. While the first subrule (adding /r/) derives specific forms, namely
the plural of a particular (small ) class of nouns, the second one requires
specific morphological features that are not needed for the schwa-
insertion rule.
(10) Noun-stem formation rule ( Wurzel 1970: 47)
C
+ r_St G
D 15 D
D r / + Pl D
D D
D C + Stark GD
D D DD
D D + N_Erw DD
D
D
D
D _ Stark DD
DD
D D C G DD
ø E n / E D + Pl D HH ] N
D D D D DD
D
D
D
D
D
D
+ Mask D
D
DD
DD
p + N_Erw
D D D p D DD
E H
p + Bel
D D p DD
D D
D D DD
p + Obl
D p D
DD DD D D DD DD
p + Sub
p
DD F F I S DD
D D
D e / + N_Erw D
F I
104 R. Wiese

The number of such schwa-final nouns (noun stems according to the

present analysis) is large in present-day German. A count over the
CELEX database of German words (Baayen et al. 1993) reveals the
following: of 4,174 monomorphematic German nouns found in this data-
base, 1,034 end in schwa, among them many relatively recent assimilated
loan words such as Orange ‘orange’ or Fassade ‘façade’. On the other
hand, only 152 of these nouns end in [en].8 That is, while this type of
schwa still occurs in a minority of cases, the minority is sizable. It must
also be taken into account that this ending is productive only with
feminine nouns.
I draw the conclusion from this independent description that stems of
German tend to end in a vowel, namely schwa in the more general case,
and that it is one of the major functions of the German schwa in final
position to provide stems with a final vowel.9
For further evidence that this interpretation of final schwa might be cor-
rect, we may note how nominal inflectional markers for nouns are treated
by Wurzel in his account. As shown in (11), there are inflectional markers
(Flexive), which are always ordered after the Stammbildungselement (stem-
formation element). I interpret this ordering as being related to the
categories of stems and words: stem-formation elements are attached to
stems (hence the name), inflectional markers are attached outside of
those, at the word level. Examples in the final column of (11) contain
both stem-formation elements (r, n) and inflectional markers (n, e, plus s
from the preceding column).10
(11) Difference betweeen stems and words ( Wurzel 1970: 49):
ohne Affix Stammbildungs- Flexiv Stammbildungselement
element und Flexiv
kind % % – kind %+s kind+r+n
das Kind des Kindes den Kindern
bär % % bä: r+n % – bä: r+n+e
der Bär des Bären die Bären
– stra: s+e % – stra: s+n+n
die Straße den Straßen
– end+e % – end+n+e
das Ende die Enden
tank % % – tank %+s –
der Tank des/die Tanks
Note now that the inflectional markers are always consonants — with
the exception of e, which requires some discussion. Wurzel postulates a
final schwa (again written as e) for some of the nominal paradigmatic
 The structure of the German vocabulary 105

classes, but this segment is always deleted afterward. That is, the surface
form of assumed bär+n+e is invariably [bE:.en) (Bären). In other
words, to postulate this final schwa as an inflectional marker is in spirit
with the theoretical approach of the time (SPE framework) but is in
strong contrast to the surface structure and therefore highly dubious on
theoretical grounds. A unit is first introduced and then deleted without
a trace (similarly for +n +n in the final column). If we therefore neglect
this item, we can conclude that the set of word-related inflectional markers
postulated in Wurzel (1970) for the German noun system invariably
consists of consonants, specifically /s/ and /n/.

2.3. Words

We have now moved upward from the stem to the word and have seen
some very tentative evidence that the words might be marked by conso-
nants in inflectional paradigms of nouns. But for words, further indepen-
dent evidence for the claim is available. I suggest that proper nouns
(names) are distinct from common nouns in that they are always words,
but not stems or roots. The evidence for this is morphological: names
cannot be inflected in the way common nouns can be. In accordance
with the analysis of inflectional suffixes above, which separates stem-
related suffixes from word-related ones, it is indeed the case that proper
names can only be suffixed by the word-related suffixes, namely genitive
singular, or plural /s/, see Peter-s (gen. sg. or pl.).
Furthermore, we can ask again how the edges of names are marked
by looking at a corpus of such names. As one first result, in (12) the
number of vowel-final and consonant-final second names in an electronic
telephone directory for the city of Rostock containing more than 50,000
names is tabulated.11

(12) Edge marking of words: last names

Consonants Vowels
no. % no. %
Right edge 42421 85.2 7352 14.8

The result is that a large majority of last names (85%) end in a consonant.
Before discussing the relevance of this finding, a second set of figures can
be added: (13) presents a quantitative summary for a list of German first
names, this time from a smaller database found on the internet.
106 R. Wiese

(13) Edge marking of words: first names

Consonants Vowels — total Vowels — a
no. % no. % no. %
Right edge 194 63.8 110 36.2 69 22.7
Here, the result is blurred somewhat by the fact that many first names
for females end in -a which can actually be seen as a (borrowed) suffix
deriving female names, such as Martin–Martin-a, Josef–Josef-a, and
numerous others. Subtracting the female names ending in -a from the
total, the result is that there are only 13.5% of vowel-final names. Again,
the observation is confirmed: names are predominantly consonant-final.
However, these results from given names and family names must be
held against some consideration of what would be expected by chance.
Suppose, in a first approximation, that consonants and vowels are distrib-
uted randomly over words, constrained only by hard phonotactic con-
straints, such as the effect of the German rule of final devoicing, that is,
without any preferences for particular sounds or classes of sounds. If
this distribution of consonants vs. vowels should be indistinguishable
from those found in (12) and (13) above, we would have no reason to
argue that words preferably end in consonants. Finding such a chance
distribution is not trivial, but one possible approach is presented here.
One possible count (presented in [14]) then reveals that 14 possible
consonantal phonemes can appear word-finally, while 13 possible vowel
phonemes can appear in the same context. Two affricates, /pf/ and /ts/,
were counted separately here, as well as three diphthongs. The two major
classes of phonemes excluded are the voiced obstruents and the short,
lax vowels, neither of which occur word-finally according to most descrip-
tions. Alternative classifications of phonemes are always possible, of
course, but would not dramatically change the picture. In particular, if
we add both classes of nonoccurring sounds, namely voiced obstruents
and short vowels, the situation is basically the same again.
(14) Chance distribution (phonemes in word-final position):
Consonants Vowels
no. % no. %
14 51.9 13 48.1
A possible objection to this way of calculating a chance distribution is
that the types and qualities of consonants and vowels (and thus their
respective numbers) are in fact irrelevant. This would lead to the simpler
null hypothesis that words could end in either an open syllable (i.e. final
 The structure of the German vocabulary 107

vowel ) or a closed syllable (i.e. final consonant). With this binary split
(a word can only end in a closed or in an open syllable), final consonants
and vowels would have a completely even probability of occurring. For
German, this distribution is in fact very close to the one found in (14),
and again, it does not match the factual situation.
The empirical results reported above for first and last names are
expected not by the chance distribution based on the numbers of conso-
nants and vowels, nor by the chance distribution of open and closed
syllables, nor by the requirements of syllabic well-formedness, which
would give vowel-final words a clear majority. The general picture found
in the data is again surprisingly uniform and can be sketched as in (15):
for the right edge, there is a switch from consonant to vowel and back
to consonant when we move from roots to stems to words in German.
(15) Edge marking of categories:
Word  Consonant
|
Stem  Vowel
|
Root  Consonant
As in the case of roots and stems, we can easily state optimality-theoretic
constraints to express the findings of words; see (16) for one possible
attempt. Of these, the left-alignment constraint in (16b) was not justified
above. However, as there is no mechanism at all, in either the phonology
or the morphology of German, that shows a tendency to form initial
vowels, we may actually assume for the time being that it holds.
(16) OT constraints for words:
a. ALIGN-R (word, [cons])
b. ALIGN-L (word, [cons])
The alignment schema for constraints provides an obvious mechanism
for the description of all the facts enumerated so far. More important,
however, is the functional view of phonological structures made possible
by these results: phonological features mark the boundaries of linguistic
units and thereby fulfill the demarcative function first proposed by
Trubetzkoy (see [1]). It must be added, though, that the proposal does
not imply that words are identical to roots. This is obviously not the
case: if roots are generally monosyllabic, words tend to be polysyllabic.
Also, the word-final consonants are often a subset of those found for
roots (see Golston 1996b on Sanskrit and Greek).
The description of rightmost edge marking for roots and stems given
above allows for a straightforward prediction: suppose it is true that
108 R. Wiese

roots are generally marked with a consonant at their right edge, as the
evidence strongly suggests. Constraint (9a) then holds. If, in addition,
the switch from consonant to vowel in moving up the morphological
hierarchy to the stem is the preferred move, then we have all the grounds
needed for a prediction: we should be able to find evidence for a constraint
(17a), but there could be no constraint (17b). In fact, constraint (17a)
is something like a derived constraint, one that does not need to be stated
independently, while (17b) cannot be thus derived.
(17) Predictable and unpredictable constraints
a. ALIGN-R (stem, [−cons])
b. ALIGN-R (stem, [cons])
There is the additional aspect that the constraint in (17a) is not even
statable if a feature model with a unary (not binary) feature [consonantal ]
is adopted. Suppose that only [consonantal ] exists, but [−consonantal ]
does not. Introducing a katathetic vowel for stems could not count as a
violation of feature insertion since no such feature is available. Is there
evidence that the predictions just made ([17a] is either a derived constraint
or unstatable, while [17b] is disallowed ) are true? As we have seen in the
preceding section, theme consonants do not seem to exist, while theme
vowels are widespread. (In the perspective of the present paper, noun-
final schwa in German may well be called a theme vowel.) Furthermore,
a notion developed in the minimalist theory of Chomsky (1995) may be
used to ensure that not all the structural categories available in morphol-
ogy are actually present. Consider a simple, and consonant-final, root of
German and its structure, as in (18).
(18) Minimal structures for simplex roots
Word
|
Stem
|
Root
|
[tI ]
While the structural categories presented here for this item (root, stem,
word ) are those admitted by the system introduced in (5), it is possible
that not all of them are actually needed. In particular, an intermediate
node such as stem that does not branch may well be pruned from the
structure (see Itô and Mester 1998: section 5 for a similar argument with
respect to German compounds). In other words, for the simplex word
 The structure of the German vocabulary 109

Tisch only the root and the word are visible, and constraints referring to
the stem are irrelevant, as this category is invisible or virtually nonexist-
ent. If such a view can be defended, the need for linguistic items to obey
all constraints (an impossible achievement anyhow) is greatly reduced.

3. Constraints on constraints

There is a more general conclusion to be derived from the analyses

presented in this paper: constraints as conceptualized in optimality theory
are not necessarily independent of each other.12 Rather, the existence of
one constraint can impose a heavy restriction on the existence of some
other constraint. This interaction of constraints within the grammar will
be discussed in this final section.
Note first that the findings summarized in (4) for stress and (15) for
consonants and vowels at morphological edges can be captured somewhat
abstractly by a principle of contrast. I propose a formulation of such a
principle in (19), assuming that such a principle is indeed more general
than our two examples have shown. As contrast is surely one of the most
deeply rooted notions in phonology, such a principle makes a lot of
functional sense.13
(19) Principle of contrast (CONTRAST-P):
For any two categories A and B that are syntagmatically or
paradigmatically adjacent:
If category A bears a phonological property P, B should 
bear P.
Crucially, the formulation of CONTRAST-P generalizes over structures
that are either syntagmatically or paradigmatical (hierarchically)
arranged. Therefore, we note that this principle is akin to a notion well
known in recent phonology, namely the principle of obligatory contour
(OCP; see Leben 1973; McCarthy 1986; Odden 1986, and others). The
OCP demands contrast, or, rather, disallows the absence of contrast; see
the schematic example for a situation disallowed by the OCP in (20).
This constraint says that two units A, B should not bear the feature
[Labial ] twice, at least not if the two units are adjacent on their tier and
are not parts of different linguistic units.
(20) OCP as an instantiation of CONTRAST-P:
*A B
| |
[Lab] [Lab]
110 R. Wiese

The close similarity between the two German cases of paradigmatic

contrast discussed above and the OCP is only blurred by the fact that
OCP cases typically involve syntagmatic relations ( like the syntagmatic
adjacency between A and B in [20]), whereas CONTRAST-P, see (19),
generalizes to all types of adjacency, syntagmatic or paradigmatic.
But what is the status of the principle formulated in (19)? Several
options are available: CONTRAST-P could be a metaconstraint, a prin-
ciple regulating the relationship between two or more constraints, or it
could be a standard constraint, of the OCP type, or it could be something
completely different. What I would like to suggest here is that the current
evidence suggests that a metaconstraint is indeed operative here.14
Consider again the possible OCP constraint disallowing two adjacent
labial segments (or other structures). What the formulation in (20) hides
is the fact that each of the two labial elements is already a constraint
violation. In optimality theory, each occurrence of a feature in a represen-
tation counts as the violation of the constraint militating against its
occurrence, in the most general version the constraint *STRUC. That
is, an OCP constraint such as (20) already contains reference to two
independently needed constraints. More generally, CONTRAST-P, (19),
refers to two independent constraints, which of course may entertain
different rankings in the language-specific hierarchy. (21) is an attempt
to reformulate CONTRAST-P in this fashion.
(21) Principle of contrast as a metaconstraint
CONTRAST-P (CAT-A, P; CAT-B, NON-P)
Again, given that the marking of category A by some phonological
property P is expressed by means of a constraint (schema), the constraint
militating against the marking of category B by the same property is a
metaconstraint regulating the relationship between two constraints.
Furthermore, the formulation in (21) adopts the view that metacon-
straints must be included into the set of constraints that are operative in
a grammar.
Itô and Mester (1998) propose to interpret the OCP by means of more
elementary, independently needed, mechanisms. They develop a formal-
ization of the OCP in terms of constraint conjunction in the sense of
Smolensky (1995). For example, the ban against two labials as in (20)
is expressed, according to their proposal, as the local conjunction of the
constraint against the feature labial with itself, crucially within a given
domain (morpheme, word, etc.). The cases discussed in the present paper
are different as they deal with dissimilarity  domains. I do not
see at present how these cases can be expressed via local constraint
 The structure of the German vocabulary 111

conjunction. Rather, a treatment in terms of a metaconstraint seems

necessary.
The right-to-left switch observed for German stress patterns can equally
well be captured by a principle of contrast. In current OT, edge-related
stress is captured by an alignment of strong elements (heads) to a left or
right edge of their mother constituent; see (22) for a constraint schema
of this sort, with PRC as a variable over prosodic constituents (cf.
EDGEMOST; Prince and Smolensky 1993).
(22) L/R alignment
ALIGN (PRC, L/R, HEAD (PRC ), L/R)
The CONTRAST-P, (21), would require that the value for the edge
parameter in this schema is not identical for any two vertically adjacent
constituents. Left and right will alternate, as seen above for German
stress.

4. Conclusions

The main point of this paper is that left–right asymmetries (see stress)
and vertical asymmetries (see the switch in feature values between mor-
phological levels) are pervasive. The presupposition is that the lexical
categories as outlined in (2) for stress domains and in (5) for morphologi-
cal domains exist to give structure to the (German) vocabulary. The more
structure these categories give to the lexical items, the less the vocabulary
is just a long list of arbitrary items. One empirical conclusion from the
studies presented above is that lexical categories in German are rather
strongly signalled by boundary signals, in particular by consonants and
vowels. This fact can easily be overlooked in linguistic frameworks that
have no means of integrating quantitative evidence of the type adduced
above. But once a more direct connection between markedness and
representation is made, as in direct OT, patterns emerge. It should be
added here that the patterns found for German do not seem at all
restricted to this language. That roots of Indo-European languages gen-
erally behave in this way ([cons] initially and finally) is rather well known;
that it is also true for typologically or genetically distant languages such
as Bantu languages is less obvious, but equally true.
In the present bird’s-eye studies of German stress and of edge marking
for morphological or lexical categories, we have seen that phonology is
functional and delimitative, to a larger extent than the functional view
of Trubetzkoy and Jakobson could foresee. A wider perspective for these
considerations would consider whether phonemic representations, which
112 R. Wiese

are implicitly or explicitly conceived as strings of segments, can be com-

pletely reformulated by means of notions of delimitation. In direct OT,
such a move is quite natural. As Golston (1996a) demonstrates, a repre-
sentational account relying solely on constraint violation is possible and
does away with most, if not all, of the linear order of phonemic represen-
tations as strings of segments. In any case, a representational theory
replacing arbitrary strings of segments by edge marking can express the
functional significance of the asymmetries noted in this paper more
directly.

Received 11 July 1999 Philipps University, Marburg

Revised version received
13 September 2000

Notes

1. The ideas expressed in this paper were first presented at a colloquium celebrating the
60th birthday of Dieter Wunderlich in Düsseldorf. I also thank audiences at colloquia
in Marburg and Santa Cruz, California, for their input, and Birgit Alber and Susanne
Niedeggen-Bartke, Marburg, and Chris Golston, Fresno, for their contributions.
Finally, two anonymous reviewers helped to improve this paper. Correspondence
address: Institut für Germanistische Sprachwissenschaft, Philipps-Universität
Marburg, D-35032 Marburg, Germany. E-mail: wiese@mailer.uni-marburg.de.
2. Trubetzkoy’s phonology can be characterized as a functional approach largely because
it identifies the three above-mentioned functions of sound structure and views sound
structure in relation to these functions. The cumulative function is completely ignored
in the following.
3. ‘‘These two functions of sound, the distinctive and the delimitative, must be strictly
distinguished. The distinctive function is a necessary ingredient of language: the indi-
vidual complexes of sound that correspond to units of meaning must of necessity be
kept distinct from each other so that they will not be confused. (...) On the other hand,
the external boundaries of meaningful complexes of sounds are not in any way neces-
sary. It is possible for these sound complexes to follow each other in an uninterrupted
flow of speech without any hint at their boundaries’’ (translated by the author).
4. I assume that the existence of the categories in (3) is established prior to (and partly
independent of ) the stress rules. Otherwise, as a reviewer suggests, there would be the
danger of circularity: units and stress rules motivate each other. While one of the main
points to be made here is that stress alternates because of its function of marking
linguistic units of a particular type, stress is not absolutely necessary to differentiate
between, for example, compounds and phrases. This is witnessed by the fact that
exceptions exist in both directions: German has right-strong compounds and left-
strong phrases. The distinction between such compounds and phrases can still be made,
for example on the grounds of separability on the syntactic level. In general, there is a
(hopefully converging) set of syntactic, morphological and phonological regularities
for the existence of the units under discussion.
5. Example taken from Alber (1998: 117).
 The structure of the German vocabulary 113

6. Very little discussion can be found on the stem category in German. Neef (1996:
section 2.2) uses the stem in a sense different from the one used here, namely as the
formal representation of any lexical item.
7. The vowel is given as /e/, but there is a further rule in this account reducing this vowel
to schwa. In general, Wurzel’s account is very much within the spirit of SPE (Chomsky
and Halle 1968). My argument is based on the assumption that a number of insights
given in this work hold independently of the formal framework in which it is couched.
8. The search was performed over the so-called stem lexicon in CELEX. The resulting
lists of forms reveal some errors (for example with respect to segmentation in mor-
phemes). As these errors probably do not introduce a bias, they were not corrected.
9. There is a long-standing uncertainty whether to treat final schwa in German nouns as
a morpheme or not. Wurzel’s proposal basically is that it is a minimal morpheme
marking nothing but the category of its base as a noun stem.
10. It is not clear to me why the stem marker r (as in kinder, ‘child, pl.’) is not listed in the
second column of (11).
11. Data were taken from the computer-readable telephone directory D-Info 1996. Given
that the names are in orthographic form, there are some uncertainties involved, for
example for foreign names. However, the quantitative impact of these problematic
cases is negligible. Counting was in terms of tokens and not types here, in contrast to
the immediately following data.
12. Of course, in OT, constraints also interact with each other in that they enter constraint
ranking. In this other sense, they are never independent of each other.
13. There is another principle of contrast, as used by Clark (1987, 1993) and Carstairs-
McCarthy (1994), which postulates that any two forms should differ in meaning. The
present principle, instead, requires contrast  a single form. This is not to say
that there may not be a deeper connection between the two observations.
14. McCarthy and Prince (1995: 364–365) introduce another example. They argue for a
metaconstraint in which the faithfulness of roots is higher ranked than the faithfulness
of affixes. The task of this metaconstraint is to fix the, otherwise variable, ranking
between two constraints. In the type of metaconstraint discussed here, the function of
the metaconstraint is different: it fixes feature values in an otherwise open constraint
schema.

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