Phonological domains in Luxembourgish and their relevance for the phonological system

Abstract

Situated in the recent discussion on syllable languages and word languages, the relevance and impact of phonological domains for the phonology of Luxembourgish will be discussed. Analyzing various aspects of the phonological organization of Luxembourgish, the paper addresses the question whether there is one main prosodic domain, i.e. either the phonological word or the syllable, shaping the overall phonological structure of this language. The features presented concern the distribution of shwa, syllable complexity, the behavior of unstressed syllables, the role of the trochaic foot as well as the impact of the language contact with French. It turns out that Luxembourgish cannot be attributed to either the syllable language or word language type. Instead, features originating from both types seem to be mixed in an intricate way. Furthermore, frequent sandhi phenomena like the n-rule and voicing assimilation show that indeed both phonological domains are necessary to describe the structures appropriately.

Luxembourgish

“…Especially for younger speakers, the merger seems to be largely completed, and the words in (4) are all produced with the same fricative (Conrad, 2021;Gilles, 2019b). (Gilles, 2014). The entire system of this "resyllabification-cum-voicing" is yet not fully understood.…”

“…All word-final alveolar nasals are subject to a phonological rule of n-deletion (n-Reegel, sometimes also mobile-n or Eifeler Reegel; Gilles, 2006bGilles, , 2014. According to this rule, the phonetic realization of word-final n depends on the nature of the initial sound of the following word.…”

Wortsprachliche Merkmale im Alemannischen

“…Im Bereich der historischen Sprachwissenschaft wurden das Deutsche (Szczepaniak 2007) und das Indoiranische (Kümmel 2014) analysiert. Im Bereich der Dialektologie wurden das Alemannische (Schrambke 2003;Nübling/Schrambke 2004;Szczepaniak 2006), Katalanische (Caro Reina 2014a), Italienische (Schmid 2014), Luxemburgische (Gilles 2014), Niederdeutsche (Höder 2014) und Niederländische (Noske 2005) untersucht. Sprachvergleichende Studien wurden geliefert für die germanischen Sprachen (Nübling/Schrambke 2004), Alemannisch und Dänisch (Schrambke 2007), Deutsch und Spanisch (Szczepaniak 2009), Deutsch und Luxemburgisch (Szczepaniak 2010) und Katalanisch, Trique (Otomangue-Sprache in Mexiko) und Türkisch (Caro Reina 2018).…”