TONE AND QUANTITY IN THE LIMBURGIAN DIALECT OF NEERPELT

Jörg Peters
Radboud University Nijmegen

ID 1563
[full paper]

The Limburgian dialect of Neerpelt is located in the northwestern corner of an area whose dialects are known for having a lexical tone contrast. It is not clear whether Neerpelt still belongs to the tonal dialects of Limburg, and there are other dialects in northwestern Limburg using a quantity contrast in place of the tonal contrast. To examine whether the dialect of Neerpelt has a tonal contrast, two reading tasks were carried out using tonal minimal pairs from other Limburgian dialects as target words in different prosodic contexts. The results suggest that the dialect of Neerpelt has both pitch differences which cannot be reduced to durational differences and durational differences which can-not be reduced to a quantity contrast. We conclude that the dialect of Neerpelt has a lexical tone contrast comparable to the contrast in other tonal dialects of Limburg.