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Chapter 7 - Tone Accent in North and West Germanic

from Part I - Phonology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2020

By
Björn Köhnlein
Edited by
Michael T. Putnam  and
B. Richard Page
Michael T. Putnam
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
B. Richard Page
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
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Summary

This chapter discusses tonal accent in North and West Germanic. Varieties with tonal accent display (primarily) tone-based oppositions between two accents in stressed syllables, commonly referred to as Accent 1 and Accent 2. In North Germanic, tonal accent occurs in most varieties of Norwegian and Swedish, as well as some in varieties of Danish; in West Germanic, it can be found in dialects spoken in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands. Examples are [man1] ‘basket’ vs. [man2] ‘man’ for West Germanic (Arzbach), or [1andən] ‘the duck’ [2andən] ‘the spirit’ for North Germanic (Stockholm). For each of the two areas, this chapter reviews some basic synchronic properties of the respective tone accent systems, including patterns of variation across dialects. It furthermore provides a brief overview of the tenets of different synchronic analyses of the phenomena, as well as of diachronic approaches to the genesis and diachronic typology of tonal accent.

Keywords

tone accentfoot structurelexical tonestressdiachronic typologysynchronic typologylexical distributionfocusintonation
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Germanic Linguistics , pp. 143 - 166
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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