Schwa-Elision und die Wortprosodie des Luxemburgischen

Abstract

In the young Germanic language Luxembourgish schwa can be dropped in the context before (and sometimes after) a sonorant and following a stressed syllable, e. g. Elteren > Elt_ren ‘parents’. The present paper describes schwa deletion from three perspectives: (1) the influ-ence of speech rate (allegro vs. lento speech), (2) the influence of the segments adjacent to schwa and (3) the prosodic structure of words. The results of an empirical investigation with 15 native speakers show that the deletion is very frequent in spoken Luxembourgish and that the two first aspects jointly account for the phenomenon. Regarding the third aspect, due to the loss of the vowel and hence of a syllable the predominance of the dactyl shifts towards the trochee, which constitutes the unmarked foot type in spoken Luxembourgish.