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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)San Francisco, CA, USA |
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The town of Weert, in the Dutch province of Limburg, has usually been included in the Limburg-Rhenish lexical tone area. However, measurements of the intonation contours of supposed tonal pairs did not reveal a lexical tone contrast in the dialect of Weert; rather, what emerged from the data was a vowel length opposition. Moreover, Accent II words in the nearby tonal dialect of Baexem were shown to correspond to words having long vowels or diphthongs in Weert, while their short counterparts, a short vowel or a short vowel plus glide combination, were generally used instead of Accent I. These correspondences were not always straightforward, since interfering lengthening processes that took place in Old Dutch, obscured the general picture.
Bibliographic reference. Heijmans, Linda (1999): "Lexical tone in the Dutch dialect of Weert?", In ICPhS-14, 2383-2386.