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A tonal analysis of Cologne Schärfung

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 January 2005

Carlos Gussenhoven  and
Jörg Peters
Carlos Gussenhoven
Affiliation:
Queen Mary, University of London and Radboud University Nijmegen
Jörg Peters
Affiliation:
Radboud University Nijmegen
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Abstract

The word prosody of the dialect of Cologne includes a phonological contrast in stressed syllables which at first sight might either reflect a ternary quantity contrast or a binary quantity contrast plus a tone contrast. There are differences in duration as well as F0 between Accent 1 (Schärfung) and Accent 2, along with differences in the intensity profiles of the syllables. It is argued that the contrast is one between an unspecified lexical tone (T) (Accent 2) and no tone (Accent 1), and that the lexical tone assimilates to an intonational tone. We show that a ternary quantity contrast (i) cannot capture the difference between Accent 1 and Accent 2; (ii) would imply an otherwise unattested distributional confinement to the syllable coda of geminate consonants and (iii) would imply unexpected intonation contours in bimoraic syllables. By contrast, a tonal analysis readily accounts for the phonetic and distributional facts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , August 2004 , pp. 251 - 285
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We would like to thank Alice Tiling-Herrwegen of the Akademie för uns kölsche Sproch for her help with finding speakers and giving us indispensable practical assistance and information. We thank our speakers for giving us their time and best efforts. Our text has greatly benefited from the comments on two earlier versions by two referees and an associate editor, for which we are very grateful. This work was carried out as part of the project Tonale Dialecten van het Nederlands, which is funded by the Vlaams–Nederlands Comité, a joint research foundation of the Fonds voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek Vlaanderen (FWO) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO).