Prosodic Variation in Particle Constructions in Three Norwegian Dialect Areas

Abstract

Particle verbs in Norwegian are often realized as one maximal prosodic word with main stress either on the verb or the particle, but sometimes the verb and the particle project their own maximal prosodic words. This article contains a prosodic analysis of particle verbs in the Nordic Dialect Corpus (Johannessen et al. 2009) from three dialect areas: Finnmark, Trøndelag and Buskerud. In all three areas there is a variation between at least four different accent realizations. A maximal prosodic word with the main stress on the verb, so-called compound accent, is the most common realization of particle verbs in the material, but this is also the most restricted realization; it is not possible when an accented word intervenes between verb and particle, and it requires a verb–particle structure. In addition, there are several probabilistic factors the affect the likelihood of a certain prosodic realization. Syntactic traits like surface constituency are ignored by the phonological grammar.