Different opinions about Mongolian prominence structure can be found in the literature. The most puzzling problem is the nature of lexical stress in this language, and neither its placement nor its phonetic nature have been given any final description.

We have earlier performed an acoustic investigation of vowel durations, quality and fO to find if any of these three parameters functions as signalling one particular syllable as the most prominent one. Basing ourself on this investigation we reject the existence of lexical stress in Mongolian and find prominence as functioning only at the phrasal level.

In the present article two problems are investigated. Firstly, phrasal accentuation is analysed as signalled by tonal means, and we show that the timing of the tonal gestures is best described within a mora analysis of Mongolian. Secondly, we argue for an analysis where nasals in the syllable coda have a moraic function.