House, David

Karlsson, Anastasia

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Lund University Publications

LUND UNIVERSITYPO Box 117221 00 Lund+46 46-222 00 00High boundary tones in spontaneous Southern SwedishKarlsson, Anastasia; House, David2017Document Version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordLink to publicationCitation for published version (APA):Karlsson, A., & House, D. (2017). High boundary tones in spontaneous Southern Swedish. Abstract fromPhonetics and Phonology in Europe 2017 , Cologne , Germany.Total number of authors:2General rightsUnless other specific re-use rights are stated the following general rights apply:Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authorsand/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by thelegal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private studyor research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portalRead more about Creative commons licenses: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will removeaccess to the work immediately and investigate your claim.High boundary tones in spontaneous Southern Swedish. Anastasia Karlsson1, David House2  1Lund University, 2Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm  Our study investigates the relationship between intonation and discourse structure in spontaneous narratives in Southern Swedish. Swedish uses intonation both lexically and postlexically. On the lexical level, two word accents are distinguished, accent 1 and accent 2. There is a systematic variation between dialects in the realization of word accents, described within the dialectal word accent typology (Gårding 1977). Tonal contours in Swedish are composed of lexical tones, prominence tones and boundary tones. There are systematic differences between dialects in the realization (alignment and association) of these tones. Southern Swedish has following composition (adapted from Riad 2006):    Lexical tone Prominence tone  Boundary tone Accent 1  H L] Accent 2 L H L]  Association of the postlexical tones depends on syntactic and information structure. Postlexical intonation has been best described in Central Swedish, while Southern Swedish has received very little attention in the literature. It has been proposed that Southern Swedish has rather weak tonal cues for focal accentuation showing little difference from basic accentuation patterns (Bruce 2007). Our study is, to our knowledge, the first one that treats Southern Swedish spontaneous speech and investigates accentuation and phrasing in connection with discourse structure. We concentrate on right boundaries and show that their functions and distribution can only be explained in connection to discourse structure. The material consists of 12 spontaneous narratives spoken by six speakers in pairs (three females, three males between 20-30 years of age). The narratives are of two different genres, retelling a movie/picture story and telling about an everyday activity (e.g. cooking). The recordings were analyzed by using three levels, Topic (what the proposition is about) and Comment (information about the Topic), New and Given status of referents, and, finally, prosodic transcription of boundaries and most prominent accents. In the final step, all three levels are compared to determine the connection between them.  High, right-edged boundaries are strikingly frequent in the material. Based on phonetic evidence we differentiate between H% and LH% boundaries. These boundary tones are realized on the last sonorous segment in a word. In monosyllables with prominence tone it gives (L) H LH% and (L) H H% contours. In polysyllabic words H% often results in a high plateau between H and H%.  The high rising terminals could be described as uptalk which is more and more typical for younger people, and we do suppose that we are dealing with uptalk in many cases in our material. However, LH% and H% seem to have different functions, and these functions are connected to discourse structure. H% has a connector function with the following content. LH% occurs when a new Topic is introduced. Old Topic does not usually get LH%, although it may be possible for new referents to receive a LH% tone in a Comment.  It is still under investigation whether both boundary tones can have focal function in some contexts (such as new referents in a Topic or Comment).  Southern Swedes have thus to incorporate high boundaries to the prosodic system with an already rather high phonological load of high tones.    References: Bruce, Gösta. 2007. “Components of a prosodic typology of Swedish intonation”. In Tones and Tunes, Volume 1, T. Riad; C. Gussenhoven (eds.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 113-146. Gårding, Eva. 1977. The Scandinavian word accents. (Travaux de l’institut de linguistique de Lund 11). Lund: CWK Gleerup. Riad, Tomas. 2006. “Scandinavian accent typology”. In Sprachtypol. Univ.Forsch., STUF, Berlin 59.1: 36–55.    

High boundary tones in spontaneous Southern Swedish

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High boundary tones in spontaneous Southern Swedish

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