Silbenschnitt in deutschen Dialekten

Though the concept of syllabic segmentation has regained a firm footing in the phonology of Standard German since the early 1990s, all attempts undertaken so far have failed to provide convincing evidence of a phonetic correlate for the syllabic segment. On the basis of empirical investigations on Standard German the present study establishes just such a correlate, identifiable from the characteristics of the energy curves traceable in different kinds of vowel. Analyses of dialectal language data form the basis for a classification of German dialects in terms of the existence of a phonetic correlate for syllabic segments.