15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Late Pitch Peaks in West Swedish

Gösta Bruce

Lund University, Sweden

The present paper describes a case of late pitch peak placement in West Swedish. In the Swedish prosodic typology this dialect type belongs to the double-peaked dialects, where the first pitch peak of a word in focus represents word accent proper and the second peak focal accent. In phrase-final position the focal accent H appears to seek the edge of the phrase, while in non-final position it seeks the stressed syllable of the post-focal word. This late alignment of the focal accent H has a parallel in the phonological behavior of the yes/no question intonation contour in some varieties of Eastern European languages (Greek, Romanian).

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bruce, Gösta (2003): "Late pitch peaks in West Swedish", In ICPhS-15, 245-248.