| ROA: | 381 |
|---|---|
| Title: | Vowel duration, syllable quantity and stress in Dutch |
| Authors: | Carlos Gussenhoven |
| Comment: | |
| Length: | 21 |
| Abstract: | Vowel duration, syllable quantity and stress in Dutch Carlos Gussenhoven University of Nijmegen A persistent conundrum in the analysis of stress in Dutch has been the fact that closed syllables attract stress in positions where long vowels apparently do not. This type of selective quantity-sensitivity is highly marked: in quantity-sensitive languages, long vowels are heavy (and stressed), while in addition, such a language may require closed syllables to be heavy (and stressed). This paper shows that the solution to the Dutch case is that so-called long vowels attract bimoraicity when stressed. Unstressed syllables are monomoraic and in those positions these long vowels do not differ in duration from short vowels. That is, Dutch not only has high-ranking Stress-to-Weight, but also high-ranking Weight-to-Stress (pace Prince 1990). Truly long vowels, which Dutch uses in recent loans, never appear in unstressed positions, so that underlying long vowels and closed syllables are heavy, and tense vowels are bimoraic when they end up stressed by regular footing. The revised representation of the quantity of Dutch vowels not only accurately predicts vowel durations on the basis of mora structure, but also allows the stress facts to be derived in a manner that was envisaged in recent descriptions by Nouveau and van Oostendorp, but was crucially frustrated by their failure to analyse unstressed syllables, like the first syllable in [ar.'ma:.da] 'armada', as monomoraic. The paper is to be published in an as yet unspecifiable volume. |
| Type: | Paper/tech report |
| Area/Keywords: | |
| Article: | Version 1 |