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Epiphenomenal Ejectives and Clicks in Germanic Languages: Reinterpreting Sound Patterns in other Languages

The phonological inventories of Germanic languages do not possess any phonological terms whose phonetic correlates are driven by non-pulmonic airstream mechanisms. Despite this, stops and fricatives produced with glottalic and lingual airstream mechanisms, or to be more accurate, sounds that have the acoustic structure and produce the auditory impression of sounds produced with non- pulmonic airstream mechanisms are a regular feature of utterances in languages such as German, Swedish and English (Simpson 2007). Epiphenomenal sound patterns are often far from auditorily or acoustically spectacular, and can easily be overlooked. However, such patterns are far from marginal.

More importantly, epiphenomenal or emergent sound patterns are a possible source of sound change and may over time become mainstream allophonic patterns (Ohala & Ohala 1991; Ohala 1995, 1997). The occurrence and increasing prevalence of utterance-final ejective stops and, more rarely, ejective fricatives in English is a striking contemporary and ongoing example of this (Simpson 2017, Simpson & Sulaberidze 2022). A further, perhaps unexpected, consequence of attempting to provide a detailed description of how epiphenomenal sound patterns are being produced is that they may lead us to reconsider the well-established descriptions of the regular phonetic correlates of similar elements in other languages, e.g. ejectives in Georgian or (pre-)voiced ejectives in Zhu|’hõasi (Snyman 1975, Maddieson 1984, Brandt & Simpson 2021).

References

Brandt, Erika & Adrian P. Simpson. 2021. The production of ejectives in German and Georgian. Journal of Phonetics 89, 101111.

Maddieson, Ian. 1984. Patterns of sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ohala, John J. 1995. A probable case of clicks influencing the sound pattern of some European languages. Phonetica 52, 160–170.

Ohala, John J. 1997. Emergent stops. In Proc. 4th Seoul International Conf. On Linguistics [SICOL]. Seoul: Linguistic Society of Korea, 84–91.

Ohala, Manjari & John J. Ohala. 1991. Nasal epenthesis in Hindi. Phonetica 48, 207–220.

Simpson, Adrian P. 2007. Acoustic and auditory correlates of non-pulmonic sound production in German. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37(2), 173–182.

Simpson, Adrian P. 2017. Are ejectives on the increase in English? Evidence from a single speaker. In Workshop on Speech Perception and Production across the Lifespan. London.

Simpson, Adrian P. & Nato Sulaberidze. 2022. Ejectives in English: elicitation and analysis. In Proc. Phonetik und Phonologie 18. Bielefeld.

Snyman, Jan W. 1975. Žu|’hõasi fonologie en woordeboek. Cape Town: Balkema.

Approaches to Automated Speech Annotation and the Case of Icelandic Spoken Dialogue

From auto-generated subtitles on platforms like YouTube to voice assistants such as Siri, machine-assisted Natural Language Processing (NLP) has become an increasingly integral part of our daily lives. For the linguistic researcher, the use cases of NLP systems are equally diverse. In my talk, I will provide a detailed description of one such use case, namely the chaining of different word and phoneme level recognition and alignment systems for the purpose of automatizing the annotation process. Using Python-based tools such as WhisperX and the Montreal Forced Aligner, I will explore the strengths and limitations of NLP-assisted annotation, with a particular focus on Icelandic spoken dialogue.

Gibt es Grammatikalisierungsprozesse in der Schreibung?

Theoretischer Ausgangspunkt des Vortrags ist die Frage nach der Übertragbarkeit des Grammatikalisierungsmodells auf die Schreibung/Schrift, d.h. ob und inwieweit Elemente der Graphie grammatikalisieren können. Prüfstein ist das Phänomen des Majuskelgebrauchs im Deutschen, insbesondere die historische Entwicklung der satzinternen Großschreibung, das v.a. vor dem Hintergrund des Grammatikalisierungsmodells von Narrog/Heine (2021) analysiert wird.

Null subjects in German-Greek, German-Russian, and German-Turkish bilinguals

German, Greek, Russian, and Turkish represent typologically different (non-)null subject languages. Greek is a consistent pro-drop language, Russian is characterized as a partial or non-pro-drop language with frequent subject ellipsis, and Turkish is a topic pro-drop language where overt subjects are typically required in ambiguous contexts. German, by contrast, is traditionally classified as a non-pro-drop language, with subject pronouns generally required in finite clauses. However, it exhibits topic-drop in informal registers (Fries, 1988) and under certain grammatical constraints (Trutkowski, 2016). While often perceived as sub-standard, topic-drop in German has been argued to be a canonical feature (Schäfer, 2021).
Prior research has documented increased use of overt subjects in heritage varieties of Greek, Russian, and Turkish (Dubinina & Polinsky, 2013; Haznedar, 2010; Tsimpli et al., 2004), but comprehensive crosslinguistic comparisons across registers and modalities remain limited. Research on heritage bilinguals has largely focused on transfer from the majority language to heritage languages, leaving understudied the reverse: how typologically null-subject heritage languages may influence subject realization in majority German.
In this study, we examine subject-drop in a corpus of naturalistic spoken and written data from more than 400 monolingual and bilingual speakers of German, Greek, Russian, and Turkish. Using Bayesian binomial generalized linear mixed-effects models, we investigate crosslinguistic effects in both directions. Our results reveal increased overt subject use in heritage Russian and Turkish, but not in heritage Greek. These effects are modulated by register and modality, suggesting varying degrees of persistence in null subject realization linked to the typology of the heritage language. An animacy effect—where animate subjects are more likely to be dropped—was consistent across all language pairs. In majority German, however, subject-drop patterns were similar across all bilingual groups, indicating that bilingualism per se does not lead to increased topic-drop. Instead, language status (heritage vs. majority) emerges as the key factor influencing subject expression. These findings highlight the complex interplay between typological properties, register, and bilingual language use in shaping null subject behavior across bilingual populations.

UNIVERSITÄT ZU KÖLN

Philosophische FakultätInstitut für deutsche Sprache und Literatur I

Linguistischer Arbeitskreis

Programm Sommersemester 2025

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