The structure of the German vocabulary: edge marking of categories and functional considerations

That phonology can signal the boundaries of constituents has been well know n since Trubetzkoy identified the delimitative function of phonology. In th is paper, it is argued that such edge marking may be much more systematic t han observed in earlier work. In particular, the stress domains (foot, word compound, phrase) ann the morphological categories (root, stem, word) of G erman systematize their edge marking by a repeating alternation in moving f rom left to right (stress) or by a switch in feature values for [consonanta l] (root, etc.). For the latter preference, quantitative evidence is provid ed. Such alternating patterns of edge marking are argued to be highly funct ional. Ways of treating these phenomena by means of a metaconstraint in opt imality theory are discussed in the final section.