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Tonal accents and rhyme in 18th-century Swedish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2008

Elisabet Jönsson-Steiner  and
Aditi Lahiri
Elisabet Jönsson-Steiner
Affiliation:
University of Konstanz, Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft, 78457 Konstanz, [email protected]
Aditi Lahiri
Affiliation:
Oxford University, Centre for Linguistics and Philology, Clarendon Press Institute, Walton Street, Oxford OX1 2HG, [email protected]
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Abstract

In Modern Swedish certain groups of morphemes are systematically involved in word forms that would be expected to get Accent 2 but that surface with Accent 1. Thus, Swedish infinitives usually get Accent 2 (grip-a ‘seize’), but in combination with certain prefixes, that were borrowed from Middle Low German, infinitives will always be Accent 1 (be-grip-a ‘comprehend’). The dominance and systematic occurrence of Accent 1 suggests viewing it as the lexically specified accent. In this article we are looking for historical facts about these types of words and morphemes to see if we can draw any conclusions concerning lexical accent specification for native vs. non-native morphemes. By investigating the comments on rhymes and accents in the 18th-century poetic manual by Anders Nicander (1707–1781) in combination with his own rhymed verse we can provide information about 18th-century and modern tonal oppositions in Swedish.

Keywords

lexically specified accentpoetryrhymeSwedishtonal accent
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , June 2008 , pp. 5 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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