Vowel lengthening

  Vowel lengthening occurs in the plural forms of a small set of German nouns which also exhibit a stress difference between the singular and plural roots. An example is the word Tutor, which has the singular form /t^u:tOr/ and the plural /tu:t^o:r@n/. In our analysis, such nouns belong in declension class Noun_L, defined as follows:

Noun_L:
    <> == Noun_D
    <phn root focus sing> == syl2
    <phn syl1 peak plur>  == Lengthen:<"<phn syl1 peak- plur>">.

Final syllable focus (and hence stress) is inherited from Noun_D (along with the suffixes associated with declension Noun_D) via the first, empty path, equation but this is overridden for the singular root by the second equation. Jessen (1997, 00-00 [= section 2.3.2.5]) discuss the problem that this kind of inflectional stress shift poses for level-ordered approaches to morphology in which stress is assigned at level 1 whilst regular inflectional suffixes only appear at level 2 or 3. Declension-based stress alternations of this general kind are much more common in Russian (Brown et al. 1996). The third equation specifies that the peak for the plural forms undergoes lengthening. The Lengthen function itself is then defined in a similar manner to final consonant devoicing:

Lengthen:
    <O> == o:
    <U> == u:
    <I> == i:
    <>  == IDEM.

As can be seen, there are only three vowels which actually undergo the lengthening, /O/, /U/ and /I/. These get mapped to /o:/, /u:/ and /i:/ respectively.