Abstract:
At the surface level, present-day Dutch appears to suffer a contradiction between the segmental and the prosodic phonology with respect to its vowel system. On the one hand, the tense mid vowels [ei,øy,ou] are realized as diphthongs on the segmental level, but on the other hand, these vowels do not behave as diphthongs on the prosodic level, since they fail to attract stress. By revisiting the timeless tenseness-length debate in the phonology of Dutch, and arguing, on multiple independent bases, that both tenseness and length play a role at the underlying level – an option that was hitherto not considered – and showing that these two features are not as correlated as previously thought, my thesis attempts to unify these two observations, thus proposing a resolution to the contradiction.
