The Phonology of Flapping in Norwegian Function Words. A prosodic analysis of Norwegian clitics

Abstract

The phonological process of flapping in Norwegian is the process in which an underlying voiced alveolar stop /d/ in a function word surfaces as the voiced postalveolar tap /ɾ/. The majority of the data used for this paper is from Urban Eastern Norwegian (UEN), which is a group of dialects from the south-eastern region of Norway, although similar processes and forms of flapping occur in a wide variety of other dialects as well. Assuming an Indirect Reference approach to linguistics, this phonological process is restricted to functional category items, which belongs to the syntactic domain, but these items are accessed by the phonology through prosodic constituents. The process of flapping has received next to no attention in the literature, and deserves further attention to account for the lacking information on the prosodization of function words in Norwegian, which will contribute to our understanding of prosodic phonology, as similar accounts of functional clitics has lately received attention in languages like Bulgarian, English, Xiamen Chinese, etc. The claim presented in this paper is that flapping in Norwegian is restricted to unstressed syllables in function words in which the underlying /d/ appears in an intervocalic position at the point of spellout. Further tests to the prosodic structure of function words in Norwegian finds that flapping is blocked in disyllabic pronouns due to their prosodic word-status, and that flapping is further blocked by adverbials regardless of the phonological conditions being met that would otherwise elicit flapping. This paper provides an overview of Prosodic Phonology and Optimality Theoretic constraints to account for the different prosodizations of flapping in Norwegian function words.