Luxemburgische Intonation: System und Sprachkontakt

Intonation is usually one of the latest linguistic fields to be investigated in a language, which explains why no systematic approach of the tonal inventory can be found of Luxembourgish, itself a very young and little researched Germanic language.
The main goal of this thesis is therefore to analyze the intonation of Luxembourgish in order to compile a tonal inventory by working on the characteristics of the different intonational patterns used by Luxembourgish native speakers. For this, a formal as well as a functional analysis is carried out, which is used to describe (within the autosegmental-metrical framework) the characteristics of the intonational system. This study establishes six different nuclear patterns, four of which are used in more than one conversational situation, meaning that these situations are not differentiated on the level of intonation. A thorough acoustic analysis depicts the different intonation patterns phonetically, which allows for the comparison of the same conversational situation in different speaking styles (scripted vs. unscripted speech). These findings form the basis for a comparison between the Luxembourgish intonation and the intonation of other languages, which leads to the questions whether the Luxembourgish intonation inventory differs from the ones of the two other official languages in Luxembourg, German and French. This also brings up the question about intonational transfer in the French or German speech of Luxembourgish native speakers. Results show that the German and French intonation systems differ quite strongly from the Luxembourgish system which leads to intonational interferences, even though these interferences are of a different nature in both languages.
In brief, this study provides a systematic approach to Luxembourgish intonation and for the first time combines the tonal patterns with their function in discourse while also giving insights into intonational interferences produced by Luxembourgish native speakers in French and German.