Swedish word accents in a ‘confirmation’ context

• An exploratory study on the prosodic signaling of ‘confirmation’ in Swedish is presented. Pairs of subjects read short dialogs, constructed around selected target words, in a conversational style. The target utterances were produced with a rising-falling intonation, lacking any typical ‘focal accent’ (FA). Qualitative observations and acoustic measurements reveal that the signaling of the word accent contrast appears to be, to a certain degree, optional in a confirmation context. The results support the view that no tonal target needs to be assumed for accent I, and further suggest that utterance-level prominence can be realized by other means than the FA.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- General Language Studies and Linguistics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Lund model

prosody

intonation

word accent

focal accent

neutralization

Publikations- och innehållstyp

kon (ämneskategori)

vet (ämneskategori)