Closure durations in stops and grammatical encoding: On definite articles in Luxembourgish

peer reviewed ; This paper examines the phonetic substance of the cliticised definite article in Luxembourgish, which generally renders as an alveolar lenis stop conso-nant, and how it relates to similar lexical alveolar stops and homorganic consonant clusters. It turns out that closure duration is the decisive acoustic feature: Compared with lexical stops, the clitic alve-olar stop is realised with longer closure duration, which leads to a three-way distinction of alveolar stops.