On the Phonemic Status of Labial Approximants in Dutch

In Dutch, the phonological relation between the labiodental spirant approximant [ʋ], found in word-initial position, and the labial–velar semi-vowel [w], found in word-final position, has been a subject of interest for several scholars. Most of them agree that these two sounds should be regarded as allophonic variants of the phoneme /ʋ/. This assumption, however, has never been tested empirically, and the supposed allophonic realizations have never been acoustically measured. The present thesis provides solid empirical evidence that the assumed status of [w] and [ʋ] as allophones of the same phoneme in Dutch is, at the very least, debatable. An acoustic analysis performed on intervocalic clusters, on the one side, and on the two intervocalic coda and onset “control” conditions, on the other, shows that the cluster should actually be regarded as a perfect, plain sequence of coda [w] and onset [ʋ]: it never degeminates, as it would be expected, instead, if coda [w] and onset [ʋ] were the same phoneme. The parameters measured in the acoustic analysis are: duration, F2 (average F2 and F2 rise), intensity (average intensity and intensity fall), and harmonicity (average harmonicity and harmonicity fall).