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Certain varieties in the Dutch and German language area distinguish two groups of words on the basis of different tonal melodies, a phenomenon called (Franconian) tonal accent. Despite extensive efforts, scholars are still far from reaching consensus on how this contrast may have developed. We show how both the accent genesis and distributional variation across dialects can be modeled by assuming that intrinsic durational differences between two sets of vowels formed the basis of the opposition. A key insight emerging from our scenario is that vowel-lengthening processes in open syllables must have been ongoing when apocope was completed, counter to the received view in Germanic historical phonology. Our analysis also addresses various broader issues concerning mechanisms of prosodic change, the interaction of sound changes, and the reliability of manuscript evidence. 

A notoriously contested subarea of phonological typology is word-prosodic typology, which governs suprasegmental structure (such as tone, syllable structure and stress) at the word level. Within word-prosodic typology, it is widely recognized that some languages have so-called stress systems while others have lexical-tone systems. Other languages appear to have intermediate systems, with properties of both stress and lexically contrastive tone. Certain types of such intermediate systems are at the core of ongoing theoretical debates on the nature of word- prosodic systems, viz. language varieties with contrasts between two word tones that are restricted to the main-stressed syllables of a word, a phenomenon that is often descriptively referred to as tonal accent. In this paper, we aim to show that exploring tone-accent systems in detail has the potential to significantly contribute to word-prosodic typology, specifically concerning the foot as a tool for the analysis of syllable-internal prosodic contrasts. The phonology of tonal accent in Franconian (a variety of West Germanic spoken in parts of Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) will be the main piece of evidence supporting our claims, with a focus on predictable interactions between segmental structure and accentuation. A central implication of our analysis is that tonal contrasts within syllables can sometimes derive from two types of feet being active in the same prosodic system. We support the Franconian evidence with analogous tone-segment interactions in Estonian and discuss the relevance of our claims in the broader context of word-prosodic typology. 

We propose a first-time synchronic, foot-based analysis of predictable interactions between tonal accent and word-medial consonant voicing in Franconian dialects. As we show, this approach is comparable to the foot-based analysis of ternary quantity in Estonian and its interaction with consonant gradation (based on Prince 1980, Odden 1997). Furthermore, we argue that the generalizations on Franconian are hard to express with an approach based on lexical tones. Our presentation contributes to two ongoing debates in prosodic typology: 1. the interaction of voicing and metrical structure, and 2. the phonological representation of tonal accent.