The Prosody of Swedish Underived Nouns: No lexical tones required
Permanent link
https://hdl.handle.net/10037/6223Date
2013Type
Journal articleTidsskriftartikkel
Peer reviewed
Author
Morén-Duolljá, Bruce TimothyAbstract
This paper provides a detailed representational analysis of the morpho-prosodic system of underived
nouns in a dialect of Swedish. It shows that the morphology, stress and tonal patterns are not as
complex as they first appear once the data are looked at in sufficient detail. Further, it shows that the
renowned Swedish "lexical pitch accent" is not the result of lexical tones/tonemes. Rather, Swedish is
like all other languages and uses tones to mark the edges of prosodic constituents on the surface.
"Accent 2" occurs when tones mark the edge of a structural uneven trochee (i.e. recursive foot) and
"accent 1" occurs elsewhere. This analysis is counter all other treatments of North Germanic1 tones and
denies the almost unquestioned assumption that there is an underlying tone specification on roots and/or
affixes in many North Germanic varieties. At the same time, it unifies the intuitions behind the three
previous approaches found in the literature.
Publisher
UiT Norges arktiske universitetUiT The Arctic University of Norway
Citation
Nordlyd 40(2013) nr. 1 s. 196-248Metadata
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