Big accents in Stockholm Swedish: Nuclear accents, prenuclear accents, and initiality accents

Abstract

Stockholm Swedish has a distinction between so-called big accents and small accents (in addition to a lexical contrast between tone accent 1 and tone accent 2). The function and distribution of the big versus small accent has never been fully understood. West Germanic languages lack a corresponding distinction. While it is known that big accents appear on information-structural focus, this fact cannot account for all big accents, nor can it explain the existence of the big accent in relation to the domains of the prosodic hierarchy. In this article, the distribution of big accents in preverbal subjects is studied. A production study is presented where native speakers read sentences with preverbal subjects of four different lengths, with or without information-structural focus. Based on the results, it is argued that heads of prosodic phrases (φ) serve as hosts of big accents (one and only one big accent per φ). The rightmost big accent in the intonation phrase (ι) is referred to as the nuclear accent, and all other (nonrightmost) big accents are referred to as prenuclear accents. Heads of φ are aligned with the right edge of φ by default. However, the leftmost φ inside an ι may (nonobligatorily) be left-headed, causing a big accent to appear at the leftmost prosodic word (ω) of ι. Such left-aligned prenuclear accents are referred to as initiality accents. These assumptions regarding the big accent in Stockholm Swedish account for the large observed variation in terms of big accent distribution in the preverbal subjects.

Match Theory and the Asymmetry Problem: An Example from Stockholm Swedish

“…Note that the rightmost H in an initiality accent sometimes drifts rightward and merges with the H of the H*L accent on haren 'the hare'. This behavior of initiality accents is well-observed in the previous literature but is not obligatory (Roll et al 2009;Myrberg 2021Myrberg , 2022.…”

“…In Stockholm Swedish, both left and right edges of ιs are prosodically expressed (Myrberg 2013(Myrberg , 2021. Because such simultaneous marking of left and right edges is relatively uncommon among the Germanic languages, this feature makes Stockholm Swedish an appropriate language for studying asymmetric distribution of prosodic left and right edges.…”

“…The left edge of a Stockholm Swedish intonation phrase is expressed with a big accent, like the right edge. Following Myrberg (2010Myrberg ( , 2013Myrberg ( , 2021 we refer to such left-edge marking big accents as initiality accents. While initiality accents have the same tonal representation as nuclear accents, they differ somewhat in terms of alignment, so that the (second) peak drifts rightward, usually all the way to the next associated tone on the tonal tier (Roll et al 2009;Myrberg 2013Myrberg , 2021Myrberg , 2022.…”

Utterance-final rises and focus marking in South Swedish

“…One-peak dialects have been said to use scaling of their single peak to boost accents that need to be extra prominent, e.g., because they signal information structural focus. Two-peak dialects, on the other hand, have been hypothesized to use the two-peak contour in accents that are prominent, whereas in less prominent accents, only the leftmost peak is realized, giving rise to two categorically distinct prominence contours [2,3,8,15,17,21] (but cf. [12] for an alternative analysis of East Norwegian).…”

“…Two peak-contours have previously been described from Central and North Swedish, West Swedish and East Norwegian [2,3,5,6,7,12,15,17,21,22]. These two-peak contours have been divided into two types: a late second peak that can appear outside the accented word, as illustrated in (1a), and an early second peak that appears directly after the first peak as in (1b).…”