Stød in unexpected morphological contexts in Standard Danish: An experimental approach to sound change in progress

Abstract

AbstractIn recent years stød has appeared in words where the current phonological and morphological principles of its distribution would exclude it. Thus, a disyllable like [ˈsiːðə]side‘page’ is without stød, also in a compound likebagside‘back page’, but it has lately been heard with stød:. In a controlled experiment, speakers were required to produce compounds consisting of an existing initial word succeeded by a final nonce noun. The results indicate that stød may be spreading in this context. Furthermore, its distribution across the 40 nonce nouns was found to be similar to its distribution among existing nouns in the vocabulary: There are more nonce nouns with stød (i) in the definite singular, (ii) especially with short stressed vowels, and (iii) particularly if the initial word is monosyllabic. A change is apparently underway which will eventually partially suspend a non-stød principle which relieves disyllabic lexemes of stød.