A non-linear analysis of pitch accent in Swedish

Abstract

There are two word tones in Swedish: Accent 1 (HL) and Accent 2 (HLHL) whose distribution is sensitive to phonological (number of syllables in stem) and morphological (nature of suffix) information, which is needed as well to construct two prosodic domains, foot and phonological word. The foot plays a central role in the mapping of tones to tone bearing units proposed here in that the foot is the underlying tone bearing unit. This captures the relationship between stress and accent assignment in Swedish and accounts correctly for the distribution of the accents. In addition, this analysis accounts for one aspect of the wide phonetic variation of the accents (the timing of the pitch peaks in the syllable) in the distribution of tones from foot to syllable where they are phonetically realized. Finally, the domain of pitch accent assignment is shown to be the clitic group, a prosodic domain in between a word and a phrase. Larger domains have as many accents as they have clitic groups contained within them.