Nina Grønnum

Prosodic Parameters in a Variety of Regional Danish Standard Languages, with a View towards Swedish and German

Acoustic analysis of six different regional variants of Standard Danish, two forms of Swedish and two of German divides the ten into two major categories: those that signal sentence intonation function by local cues and those that do it by global means. The purely global types are also those that have no default sentence accents, and which signal focus by reduction of the surroundings rather than by boosting of the focussed element (a focal accent proper). A specific final completion cue is restricted to the local intonation types and is there an entity separate from that which cues prosodic terminal or nonterminal status. The implication for models of intonation is discussed.

Danish Stød: Laryngealization or Tone

In the light of previous acoustic analyses of Danish stød and Danish intonation, we discuss two different phonological theories. In one, stød is an autonomous laryngeal syllable prosody. In the other, stød is the phonetic manifestation of an HL tonal pattern compressed within one syllable. The tonal representation is found to be contradicted by the phonetic reality, and it cannot account for the structurally determined alternation between non-stød and stød in inflection and derivation, nor for latent stød or stød in compounds. Furthermore, stød patterns are largely constant across regional varieties of Danish, but tonal patterns over the relevant structural domains are highly variable. Thus, stød may occur on any kind of tonal configuration, anywhere in the speakers pitch range, a variability which is hard to reconcile with a fixed HL representation.

Danish vowels — scratching the recent surface in a phonological experiment

Abstract The paper presents the outcome of some very recent changes in the pronunciation of standard Danish vowels, changes which add to the already considerable inventory of surface vowel contrasts. It claims that a classical structuralist phonological account of the vowel inventory is not descriptively adequate. The only reasonable abstract representation is a morphophonological one whose putative psychological reality is at least not contradicted by the results of a phonological experiment.

Rhythm, duration and pitch in regional variants of standard Danish

Abstract The acoustic analysis is an attempt to establish the durational correlates of differences in perceived rhythm in six regional variants of Standard Danish. Durational relations between vowels and consonants in disyllabic sequences vary considerably across the six regions, but the correlation with differences in perceived rhythm is nearly nil. Fo patterning — over and above its influence on the perception of duration - seems to be the main determinant of perceived rhythm.

Section Introduction. Prosodic Analysis of Natural Speech

No description of a language is complete without an account of its prosody: those aspects of speech that pertain not to individual sounds but to strings of segments, from the smallest units, morae, through syllables, words, and phrases, to utterances and paragraphs. Prosody, or suprasegmentals, encompasses syllable tones, word accents and stress, and the nonlexical phenomena rhythm (including pausing), prominence gradation and intonation (including sentence accents and juncture cues)—features that are all encoded in (the perceptual correlates of) durational relations, intensity relations, and the time-varying course of fundamental frequency, within and across the relevant temporal and structural domains.

Danish vowels - surface contrast versus underlying form

The paper presents the outcome of some very recent sound changes, which add to the already considerable inventory of surface vowel contrasts in Danish. It claims that a classical structuralist phonological account of the vowel inventory is not satisfactory if psychological reality of phonological entities is a criterion. The only reasonable abstract representation is a morphophonological one.