The phonology of tone and intonation in the Dutch dialect of Venlo

Abstract

The Dutch dialect of Venlo has a lexical tone opposition comparable to the distinction between Accent I and Accent II in Scandinavian. The two word tone patterns are realised in a variety of different ways, depending on the intonation contour, on whether the word has a focus tone, and on whether it occurs finally or nonfinally in the intonational phrase (IP). Twelve such contexts are identified, and an autosegmental-metrical analysis is presented of the contours for the word tones in each of these. The analysis is instructive because of its clear illustration of the distinction between the phonological underlying representation and the phonological surface representation, as well as of the distinction between the latter representation and the phonetic realisation. In addition, because of the complexity of its tonal phonology, the dialect is of considerable typological interest for the study of word prosody and intonation.