The Phonological Word in Tilburg Dutch
Government Phonology and a city dialect of Dutch
This book investigates some issues regarding the domain of the Phonological Word in a Dutch dialect in the framework of Government Phonology. A claim is that a specific theory may benefit from language data just as the description of a language may benefit from the application of a restrictive theory.
One issue concerns the requirement of phonological words to end in consonants. It is shown that this requirement plays a role in this dialect as well as in other languages. However, in Government Phonology this topic has not been a subject of discussion yet. This study demonstrates the importance of such a requirement and argues that it should become a topic in Government Phonology as well. The Tilburg Dutch data with respect to this point, as well as to vowel shortening, also necessitate a refinement of the view on morphophonology in GP: apparently, internal worddomains may differ from external word-domains as far as the licensing of wordfinal empty nuclei is concerned.
Another topic concerns vowel height in this dialect. The view of laxness in Government Phonology enforces a choice for a certain analysis which otherwise would have remained largely arbitrary. Apparently the restrictiveness of the theory is an advantage for the analysis. Laxness plays another role in this thesis. Lax vowels need to be followed by a tautosyllabic consonant. This fact in combination with the claim in Government Phonology that word-final consonants are not codas but onsets prompts an analysis in which such consonants have an ambisyllabic structure. In discussing these issues once more the benefit of combining a restrictive theory with the analysis of descriptive data becomes evident.
This book is of interest both to phonologists interested in phonotactics and Government Phonology and to Dutch dialectologists.
