The representation of lax vowels in Dutch: A loose CV approach

Vowels in Dutch can be classified into two main groups, which have been distinguished in terms of either length or tenseness in the literature. The main argument for a length analysis comes from the distribution of the two types of vowels in syllable structure. Vowels only occurring in closed syllables are analysed as short, while vowels restricted to open syllables are treated as long in this approach, where rhymes are required to contain exactly two positions in Dutch. However, this analysis encounters problems with stress assignment, which treats such allegedly long vowels as light, and short vowels in closed syllables as heavy. This problem can be solved by analysing all vowels as short, and making the distinction in terms of tenseness instead. In this article, I propose to account for the distributional restriction on the two types of vowels in a loose CV framework, a recent version of Government Phonology, where representations are made up of strictly alternating C and V positions. Lax vowels are claimed to be restricted to ‘closed’ syllables, because they must properly govern an empty nucleus to their right, while tense vowels are ruled out in such positions, because they cannot properly govern.