The Phonology and Morphology of Function Word Contractions in German

Abstract The observation that adjacent function words are typically contracted has been made for a number of languages including German. The problems this phenomenon poses for phonology still need to be treated, however, and the extent to which function word contractions set the stage for the evolution of inflected function words from simple cliticization remains to be explored. This paper first addresses issues with regard to the prosodic representation of function word sequences preceding lexical words (i.e., [Fnc Fnc Lex]). Investigating such contractions in a number of German dialects, it... Mehr ...