Stød Timing and Domain in Danish

Abstract

This study investigates the timing of stød, a type of phonological nonmodal phonation related to creaky voice in Danish, relative to the syllable. Stød-bearing syllables are characterized by high fundamental frequency (F0) and modal phonation at the beginning of the syllable followed by nonmodal, often creaky phonation and low F0 towards the end of the syllable (the stød phase proper). However, the timing of these two phases relative to the syllable and to each other has been debated. To investigate this, F0 throughout the word and the timing of the stød phase proper relative to the syllable were analyzed in five types of monosyllabic words. The results show that across word types the first stød phase (high F0) coordinates with the syllable rhyme onset, whilst the second phase is timed to the center of the sonorant rhyme, in contrast to previous hypotheses of stød timing. This relationship is formalized using the framework of Articulatory Phonology. In doing so, two additions to the theory are proposed to account for the biphasic nature of stød and the timing of the stød phase proper relative to the syllable.

Three quarters of a century of phonetic research on common Danish stød

“…Jailyn M. Peña’s (2022) paper was published online on 24 February 2022. Accordingly, the ‘three quarters of a century’ in the title of this review is a liberal interpretation of what – at the latest possible stage in the preparation of the manuscript – became seventy-nine years.…”

“…Peña subscribes to the generally accepted view that syllables with stød have two phases, a first phase with modal voicing and high F 0 , and a second phase typically with lower F 0 , irregular vibrations, and lower intensity. She finds that the sonorant portion of the whole syllable rhyme ‘acts as a single unit relative to stød’s gestural constellation in Danish’ (Peña 2022:2) and that the onset of the stød phase proper is timed relative to the centre of that unit. This is in explicit contradistinction to Basbøll’s mora analysis (see Section 2.2), where stød is a property of the second mora in bimoraic syllables.…”

“…To eliminate the confounding influence from differences in vowel duration in the recorded material, within and across word types, stød onset times are represented as distances (i) to the centre of the long vowel (in CVːˀ, CVːˀO, and CVːˀS words), (ii) to the V-S boundary (in CVSˀ words), and (iii) to the sonority rhyme centre (in CVSˀ and CVːˀS words), and they are expressed as proportions of the total duration of the respective domains. An example is the formula in (1) for the relative distance of stød onset to the long vowel midpoint (Peña 2022:20): …”

“…Table 3 presents the results, adapted from Peña’s Table 9 (2022:20). Note that the rightmost column, distance from vowel onset, is my add-on.…”

“…Peña does not quote the non-normalized stød onset times – that is, the distance of stød from the onset of the vowel. But the averages of this measure can be retrieved from the values in her Table 7 (vowel and consonant durations, 2022:19) and the results in Table 9 (2022:20), reproduced in Table 3 here. For example, to calculate stød onset distance from vowel onset in CVːˀ words, I looked up the average duration of the long vowel in Peña’s Table 7 (2022:19): 131 ms. Its midpoint is then at 65.5 ms. Onset distance from the midpoint is given as 9.08 ms.…”