Articles

Asymmetries in the intonation system of the tonal dialect of Maastricht Limburgish*

Carlos Gussenhoven^a1

^a1 Radboud University Nijmegen and Queen Mary, University of London

Abstract

The lexical tone and intonation contrasts in the Limburgish dialect of Maastricht are remarkable in a number of ways. While a falling pitch contour on an IP-medial syllable signals a non-declarative intonation, on an IP-final syllable it signals a declarative intonation. In addition, although there is a binary tone contrast (Accent 1 vs. Accent 2) and four nuclear intonation contours, only three intonation contours exist for nuclear syllables with Accent 2, while in IP-final position only two intonation contours exist for nuclear syllables with Accent 1, so that the full set of four intonation contours is only observable in IP-medial nuclear syllables with Accent 1. The context-dependent function of the pitch fall and the asymmetries are explained by a grammar in which the OCP is enforced absolutely, and the number of tones per syllable is restricted to two, unless the three tones each represent a different morpheme: OCP, Realise.orph≫#TTT.

Footnotes

* I am grateful to the audiences at the Phonology–Phonetics Colloquium in Atami, Japan (March 2006), the Colloquium of the Laboratório de Fonética of the University of Lisbon (July 2008), the Linguistics in the Netherlands Meeting (Utrecht, February 2009) and the Cambridge University Linguistics Society Meeting (March 2009) for useful feedback on earlier presentations of the Maastricht phenomena. I thank Flor Aarts for the uplifting grace with which he has served as an informant on his dialect over many years. Without his help and reflection this work could not have been done. Joop Kerkhoff gave technical support, and Larry Hyman, Jörg Peters, three anonymous referees and an associate editor are responsible for various improvements in the presentation after exposing themselves to a first, second or third draft.

Sound files containing the pitch contours represented in the waveforms and pitch tracks in the figures in this paper are available as supplementary online materials at http://journals.cambridge.org/issue_Phonology/Vol29No01.