The phonological representation of the Limburgian tonal accents 1

The dialects of Limburg and the adjacent Ripuarian and Moselle Franconian dialects have two tonal accents, Accent 1 and Accent 2. In the generative tradition it is taken for granted that these accents are to be represented tonally. In this article I want to take issue with this approach. I will show that there is an array of facts that cannot be explained with lexical tones. These facts rather suggest that the tonal contrast should be expressed by prosodic constituency. Specifically, I will argue that Accent 2 is a trochee dominating two syllables, whereas Accent 1 is a monosyllabic trochee. This has also been suggested in a recent manuscript by Wolfgang Kehrein (Kehrein 2010). The facts I will put forward are all polysyllabic borrowings. I show that, in borrowings, the quality of the tonal accents depends on the quality of the posttonic vowel. Facts of this type are very problematic for a tonal approach. My data are taken from the dialect of Maasbracht, in the middle of the Dutch part of Limburg. With the exception of Wolfgang Kehrein (2010), these facts have so far not been taken into consideration in the literature. With this study I hope to fill this gap. It should be noted that my article is only concerned with borrowings. Native, truly Germanic, items are not taken into consideration. Although the question how the accents are distributed in native items is very important, it is a different issue, one I cannot go into due to lack of space. I have structured this article in the following way. In the next section I define what I mean by a tonal account. In the second section I show that the quality of the tonal accents can be determined by the quality of the vowel in the following syllable. In the third section I show that it is possible to explain these correlations in terms of prosodic constituents. This leads me to the conclusion that the most economic way to represent the tonal accents is in terms of prosodic constituents, not in terms of lexical tone. Offprint from: Botma Bert & Roland Noske (eds.) (2012): Phonological Explorations. Empirical, Theoretical and Diachronic Issues. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter.