Regional varieties of Swedish: Models and synthesis

2009

The papers appear in the order in which they were given at the Conference. Only a limited number of copies of this publication was printed for distribution among the authors and those attending the meeting. For access to web versions of the contributions, please look under www.ling.su.se/fon/fonetik_2009/. We would like to thank all contributors to the Proceedings. We are also indebted to Fonetikstiftelsen for financial support.

Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 2015

We give an overview of the phonological properties and processes that define the categories of the prosodic hierarchy in Swedish: theprosodic word(ω), theprosodic phrase(φ) and theintonation phrase(ι). The separation of two types of tonal prominence,big accentsversussmall accents(previously calledfocalandword accent, e.g. Bruce 1977, 2007), is crucial for our analysis. The ω in Swedish needs to be structured on two levels, which we refer to as the minimal ω and the maximal ω, respectively. The minimal ω contains one stress, whereas the maximal ω contains one accent. We argue for a separate category φ that governs the distribution of big accents within clauses. The ι governs the distribution of clause-related edge phenomena like theinitiality accentand right-edge boundary tones as well as the distribution ofnuclear big accents.

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 ...

Journal of Phonetics, 2003

This study shows that increases in overall intensity and spectral emphasis are reliable acoustic correlates of focal accents in Swedish. They are both reliable in the sense that there are statistically significant differences between focally accented words and nonfocal ones for a variety of words, in any position of the phrase and for all speakers in the analyzed materials, and in the sense of their being useful for automatic detection of focal accents. Moreover, spectral emphasis turns out to be the more reliable correlate, as the influence on it of position in the phrase, word accent and vowel height was less pronounced and as it proved a better predictor of focal accents in general and for a majority of the speakers. Finally, the study has resulted in data for overall intensity and spectral emphasis that might prove important in modeling for speech synthesis.

This is a study of tonal representation as a function of syllable structure constituency in Swedish. The results of a production experiment indicate that the onset of the focal accent rise-which we suggest to be best represented by a bitonal LH command-is associated with the consonant onset of the postaccented syllable. Furthermore, a vowel insertion is favored in certain intervocalic consonant clusters. In light of these findings, as well a parallel study on Greek, we claim: (1) syllabification is a basic prerequisite condition in tonal analysis and intonation studies, (2) tonal targets may define syllable boundaries and hence syllabification and (3) different tonal targets may be associated with different syllable structure constituents in different languages.

R. Goedemans, J. Heinz, H. van der Hulst (eds.). The study of word stress and accent: theories, methods and data. Cambridge University Press, p. 102-143, 2019

The typology of word prosody is still a subject of debate. Tone and stress remain the central units of classification; however, there is not an established consensus about their definitions. In this chapter, I focus on two specific word-prosodic units with a non-pitch based primary phonetic exponent: prosodic quantity in Standard Estonian and prosodic laryngealization in Copenhagen Danish. I summarize their main phonetic and functional features with special attention placed on their relation to pitch and stress in the respective languages. I also compare these prosodic units with functionally similar cases of pitch-based word prosody in other languages and put them in the framework of mainstream word-prosodic typology. Both cases are challenging for the typology, as they are full-fledged phonological word-prosodic units, but do not qualify either as tone or as stress. In the end, I discuss a possible input from such cases into the debate on distinction between the notions of tone, stress, and accent.

This paper introduces a new research project Simulating Intonational Varieties of Swedish (SIMULEKT). The basic goal of the project is to produce more precise and thorough knowledge about some major intonational varieties of Swedish. In this research effort the Swedish prosody model plays a prominent role. A fundamental idea is to take advantage of speech synthesis in different forms. In our analysis and synthesis work we will focus on some major intonational types: South, Göta, Svea, Gotland, Dala, North, and Finland Swedish. The significance of our project work will be within basic research as well as in speech technology applications.

The topic of this paper is the variability of phrase-initial pitch patterns of South Swedish. Central Swedish pitch patterns for phrase-initial accent I both to the East (Stockholm) and to the West (Gothenburg) display an apparent constancy, albeit with distinct patterns: East Central Swedish rising and West Central Swedish fall-rise. In South Swedish, the corresponding pitch patterns can be described as more variable. The falling default accentual pitch pattern in the South is dominating in the major-ity of the sub-varieties examined, even if a rising pattern and a fall-rise are not uncommon here. There seems to be a dif-ference in geographical distribution, so that towards northeast within the South Swedish region the percentage of a rising pat-tern has increased, while there is a corresponding tendency for the fall-rise to be a more a frequent pattern towards northwest. The occurrence of the rising pattern of initial accent I in South Swedish could be seen as an influence from an...

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.