Phrase-initial pitch patterns in South Swedish

The paper presents duration data based on V:C and VC: sequences in isolated words in ten dialects spoken in the north of Sweden (Norrbotten and Vsterbotten) and Finland (sterbotten). Data are given as ratios of phonologically short to long vowels and consonants (V/V: and C/C:), and vowels to following consonants (V/C: and V:/C). Compared to Central Standard Swedish all the dialects employ greater durational differences to maintain distinctions of quantity, although the degree to which they differ varies between them. Generally, the further to the north and to the east, the greater the differences between the dialect and Central Standard Swedish.

Language Typology and Universals, 2006

The typological profile of Swedish-an introduction 1. The idea of a typological profile The typological profile of a language is an account of the distinctive character of its structure in relation to other languages based primarily on work in general typology but also on genetic and areal linguistics and on contrastive analysis and other types of crosslinguistic studies. Ideally, the profile should cover all major aspects of language structure but it is also possible to present the profile of a certain level such as the phonological, the syntactic or the lexical profile of a language. According to Bernard Comrie (2001) "Linguistic typology can be defined as the systematic study of crosslinguistic variation." Somewhat surprisingly, this definition, as Comrie notes, makes no mention of the notion 'linguistic type', since it is not relevant to some approaches to linguistic typology. The idea of a typological profile of an individual language (or group of related languages) also leaves it open to what extent it will be possible to refer (some level of) the language to a more general type. Rather, the idea is to give a systematic account of the values of the language with respect to basic typological parameters studied within general typology with a focus on language-specific features in order to portray its distinctive character. Since many features are genetically and/or areally distributed, there will often be good reason to situate various structures of the profiled language with respect to genetic and areal patterning, which, however, will present a rather complex picture since the degree to which various features fit into such patterns tends to vary. The term "typological profile of Swedish" (in Swedish: svenskans typologiska profil) to a great extent has been used in work concerned with the acquisition of Swedish as a second language (see 2.5). This has been the view presented by the editor of this volume and may not represent the major focus of all the other contributors. But all work that focuses on the language-specific features of a language is relevant for its typological profile and the fact that the contributors have somewhat different points of departure will assure that various aspects of the typological profile of Swedish will be approached with a broad and varied perspective. In the next section, a brief review will be given of earlier work relevant for the study of the typological profile of Swedish. Following that, there is a section presenting the individual contributions to this volume. 2. The typological profile of Swedish 2.1. General work on Swedish The literature on Swedish is extensive and no attempt will be made here to provide a general overview. The standard reference work on modern Swedish is the 4-volume gram

Studia Linguistica, 1975

This paper is concerned with four Scandinavian prosodemes: acc. 1, ace. 2, sterd, and no s t~d. Its aim is to establish the function of each of them. The much-discussed questions of whether the Swedish and Norwegian accents are dynamic or musical in nature and whether it is possible to detect tonal ingredients in the realizations of the Danish stprd and no stprd are of secondary importance. What interests us here is the role all those entities play in the system, not the details of their manifestation.

With a view to verify whether the vowel quantity is a critical part of the essence of the West Swedish dialect, manipulations of the vowel quantity in one-word utterances were carried out by means of synthetic speech. In order to distinguish the role of the vowel quantity when identifying West Swedish, a perception test was produced. The results suggest that the vowel quantity is an indispensable part of the identity of West Swedish and a required variable when synthetically reproducing the same.

Proceedings from Fonetik 2006 Lund, June 7–9, 2006, 2006

This paper is a presentation of the project Swedish accents of English which is in its initial stages. The project attempts to make a phonetic arui phonological description of some varieties of Swedish English, or English spoken in Sweden, depending on the status attributed to English in Sweden. Here I show some curious results from a study of acoustic correlates of vowel quality in the English and Swedish of young LI Swedish speakers.

Interspeech 2017

This study compares the acoustic realisation of /iː yː ʉː uː/ in three varieties of Swedish: Central Swedish, Estonian Swedish, and Finland Swedish. Vowel tokens were extracted from isolated words produced by six elderly female speakers from each variety. Trajectories of the first three formants were modelled with discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients, enabling the comparison of the formant means as well as the direction and magnitude of the formant movement. Crossdialectal differences were found in all measures and in all vowels. The most noteworthy feature of the Estonian Swedish long close vowel inventory is the lack of /yː/. For Finland Swedish it was shown that /iː/ and /yː/ are more close than in Central Swedish. The realisation of /ʉː/ varies from front in Central Swedish, to central in Estonian Swedish, and back in Finland Swedish. On average, the Central Swedish vowels exhibited a higher degree of formant movement than the vowels in the other two varieties. In the present study, regional variation in Swedish vowels was for the first time investigated using DCT coefficients. The results stress the importance of taking formant dynamics into account even in the analysis of nominal monophthongs.

2008

The research project Simulating intonational varieties of Swedish (SIMULEKT) aims to gain more precise and thorough knowledge about some major regional varieties of Swedish: South, G¨ ota, Svea, Gotland, Dala, North, and Finland Swedish. In this research effort, the Swedish prosody model and differ- ent forms of speech synthesis play a prominent role. The two speech databases SweDia 2000 and

Speech prosody, 2010

Within the research project SIMULEKT (Simulating Intonational Varieties of Swedish), our recent work includes two approaches to simulating intonation in regional varieties of Swedish. The first inv ...

Lingua, 2012

Swedish stress and tone accent exhibits an interesting mixture of properties. I argue that the stress system is arranged in a largely morphological fashion, with clear similarities to dominance systems of Japanese, Basque and Greek, where there is a distinction between accented and unaccented stems, and where prefixes and, in particular, suffixes influence stress/accent placement. A major difference is that none of the lexical specifications for stress in Swedish is pre-or post-accenting, but rather post-and pretonic. Thus, no stress is assigned by affixes, but affixes impose adjacency conditions on stress placement in stems, or else the structure is either inhibited, or becomes noticeably marked. Beside the morphological specifications of stress information, there is a phonological default stress assignment, similar to what we find in Greek. The phonological default of Swedish applies blindly when prosodic specification is lacking at the right edge of prosodic words. An accentual default occurs also in Basque, but it applies at a phrasal level rather than at the word level. Beside stress, Swedish also exhibits a lexical tone ('accent 2', 'grave'), which occurs only in primary stressed syllables, and which (in the analysis assumed here) is mostly assigned from posttonic suffixes to an immediately preceding primary stress. So-called 'accent 1' (acute) is lexically unmarked, but both tonal contours signal prominence in a similar fashion, that is, in a way that is independent of the lexical distinction as such. Stress and tonal accent both instantiate culminativity. Building on the theory of projecting words and phrases (Itô and Mester 2007), I argue that stress instantiates culminativity within the minimal prosodic word, and tonal accent instantiates culminativity in the maximal prosodic word. do exhibit culminativity at the word level. However, culminativity is not obligatory at that level . In the interest of the comparison with Central Swedish, which is the main focus of this article, I will assume that it is relevant to ask at what level (word, phrase) culminativity and obligatoriness apply. This relativization is a slight departure from conception, but in line with the fundamental assumptions of metrical theory. The variety of Central Swedish (roughly the standard language) exhibits both stress and tone accent in a particular mixture that sets it apart from most other Germanic languages. The main argument here is that both stress and tonal accents are involved in expressing culminativity in Swedish, at different levels of the prosodic structure. Stress expresses culminativity within the prosodic word, much as in the other Germanic languages, but the stress system as such will here be described in rather different terms from what is commonly the case. Intonational prominence is instantiated as tonal configurations, often called 'pitch accents', which are superimposed, typically on stressed syllables. While prominence lending pitch accents occur in all Germanic languages, Swedish and Norwegian add a lexical distinction to the prominence function of these tonal configurations. The melodic output of this distinction is often referred to as 'accent 1' and 'accent 2', or 'acute' and 'grave' (or, in the Norwegian tradition, 'toneme 1' and 'toneme 2'). The lexical distinction allows us to see clearly two levels of prominence in the tonal structure, referred to as 'word accent' and 'sentence accent' by , as 'accent' and 'focus accent' in later work by Bruce (e.g. 1998), and as 'prominence level 1' and prominence level 2' by Myrberg (2010). The two levels might well have corresponding levels in some of the other Germanic languages, but this is not obvious at the present state of the art. The categorical nature of the two prominence levels, and the methodological advantage of having access to a lexical distinction (between the tonal accents 1 and 2) at each level, makes Swedish a good case for a discussion of culminativity and levels. 1 Central Swedish also exhibits a compound rule, instantiated as a particular association pattern of the tonal configuration of accent 2, which provides further insight into the tonal structure. The tonal accents, then, exhibit prominence lending properties, beside instantiating a lexical distinction in the tonal domain. These facts about Swedish, further described below, raise the question of the domains at which obligatoriness and culminativity hold, an issue that does not come up for discussion in , where the lexical word is the point of departure. Itô and Mester (2006, 2007) have recently shown that the prosodic word, presumably a universal category 1 The levels and distinctions are charted in (38) below.