Affricates and Obstruent Geminates in Thurgovian

My Master of Arts paper has demonstrated that Thurgovian obstruents show a threefold contrast, namely between short stops (singletons), long stops (geminates) and affricates. Thurgovian is a High Alemannic dialect spoken in the northeast of Switzerland, in the canton of Thurgau. Thurgovian belongs to the West Germanic languages and thus to the Indo-European family.Fritz Enderlin also mentions the threefold contrast in the dialect variety of Kesswil (Upper Thurgovian), but doesn t specifically refer to it. Beside his research and this Master of Arts paper, the threefold contrast in Thurgovian has never been investigated before. For the first time Thurgovian affricates were acoustically measured, this was done by this study, which is based on the dissertation of Astrid Kraehenmann.In Standard German the contrast between long stops and affricates does no longer exist. The main opposition within the obstruents in Standard German and English is the presence or absence of aspiration, and not distinctive consonant length as in Thurgovian.Recorded, measured and evaluated were short stops, long stops and affricates in all word positions. The Thurgovian stops are /p/, /t/ and /k/, the affricates are /pf/, /ts/ and /kx/. Already Kraehenmann has shown that short stops contrast with long stops in Thurgovian. Her result, that closure duration (CD) and not voice onset time (VOT) is the important measure to distinguish between geminates and singletons, was confirmed by this study. The CDs of geminates in medial position are even two times longer than the ones of singletons.This Master of Arts paper was the first not only to point out that a threefold contrast exists, but also to establish that the CD of affricates lies between the one of singletons and geminates. This means in medial word position, where the CD of a geminate or a long stop is about three times the one of a singleton, that the CD of affricates is about twice as long as the one of singletons. An affricate with a geminate CD followed by one fricative portion is a geminate affricate. Therefore can be presumed that Thurgovian has geminate affricates in medial word position. However, this presumption must be verified by measuring the duration of the fricative portion.The sequence singleton-affricate-geminate is also maintained in initial and final word position, even if the CD of initial and final geminates is only about twice as long as the one of singletons. This concludes that three distinctive consonant lengths exist in Thurgovian (for this result no distinction was made between surface and underlying representation).One part of this Master of Arts paper focuses on the socio-linguistic question of differences between generations, which was not investigated by Kraehenmann either. Three of the six native speakers belong to the younger and three to the older generation. The main results are the following: The older generation produces longer geminate and affricate CDs than the younger one, while the singleton CDs are quite the same for both generations.The measurements of the singletons, geminates and affricates are entirely listed in the printed copy