Article contents
Contrastive foot structure in Franconian tone-accent dialects*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 June 2016
Abstract
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.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016
Footnotes
For helpful comments and discussion, I would like to thank three anonymous reviewers, an associate editor and the editors of Phonology, as well as Paul Boersma, Ben Hermans, Pavel Iosad, Wolfgang Kehrein and Marc van Oostendorp. Helpful suggestions also came from participants at the 21st Manchester Phonology Meeting.
References
REFERENCES
- 19
- Cited by