Contrastive foot structure in Franconian tone-accent dialects

Franconian has a contrast between two tone accents, commonly referred to as Accent 1 and Accent 2. Traditional autosegmental analyses of the phenomenon suggest that this opposition derives from the presence of lexical tone. In contrast to this ‘tonal approach’, I argue that the Franconian accent con...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Phonology 2016-05, Vol.33 (1), p.87-123
Main Author: Köhnlein, Björn
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accentuation
Dialects
Foot
Germanic languages
Morphology
Phonemes
Phonology
Regional dialects
Scottish Gaelic
Sound duration
Syllables
Theory
Tone
Vowels
West Germanic languages
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Franconian has a contrast between two tone accents, commonly referred to as Accent 1 and Accent 2. Traditional autosegmental analyses of the phenomenon suggest that this opposition derives from the presence of lexical tone. In contrast to this ‘tonal approach’, I argue that the Franconian accent contrast is based on contrastive foot structure – there is no tone in the lexicon. This ‘metrical approach’ not only accounts for the tonal differences between the accents, but also captures a variety of facts that are hard to incorporate into a synchronic tonal analysis, involving morphological alternations between Accent 1 and Accent 2, as well as the effects of vowel duration, vowel quality and consonant quality on accent-class membership. The metrical analysis of these patterns is in line with similar approaches to tone-accent contrasts in North Germanic and Scottish Gaelic.
ISSN:0952-6757
1469-8188
DOI:10.1017/S095267571600004X