Culminativity, stress and tone accent in Central Swedish

Abstract

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.