A tonal analysis of Cologne Schärfung

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.

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