The phonology of tone and intonation in the Dutch dialect of Venlo

The Dutch dialect of Venlo has a lexical tone opposition comparable to the distinction between Accent I and Accent II in Scandinavian. The two word to ne patterns are realised in a variety of different ways, depending on the i ntonation contour, on whether the word has a focus tone, and on whether it occurs finally or nonfinally in the intonational phrase (IP). Twelve such c ontexts are identified, and an autosegmental-metrical analysis is presented of the contours for the word tones in each of these. The analysis is instr uctive because of its clear illustration of the distinction between the pho nological underlying representation and the phonological surface representa tion, as well as of the distinction between the latter representation and t he phonetic realisation. In addition, because of the complexity of its tona l phonology, the dialect is of considerable typological interest for the st udy of word prosody and intonation.