The Re-accenting of Given Information in Icelandic. A Comparative Study of English and Icelandic Intonation patterns

Abstract

Geisladiskur fylgir prentuðu eintaki ritgerðarinnarIs Icelandic a de-accenting language like English, or is there a tendency towards re-accenting as in some of our neighbouring languages such as Swedish? Data was gathered from two sources: Firstly from RÚV radio newscasts, to ascertain whether re-accenting is at all common in Icelandic and to show examples of this. Secondly from the use of a an intonation survey by Alan Cruttenden which was translated put before 13 native Icelandic speakers to give some intimation of the relative frequency of de-accenting vs. re-accenting. The results turned out to be somewhat mixed. The RÚV data indicates that re-accenting is indeed common, at least in the register of newsreaders, and that given the same syntactic constructions in which an English-speaker would de-accent, Icelandic-speakers will generally tend to re-accent instead. The survey data is less clear, but indicates that Icelandic aligns roughly with Cruttenden's results for languages with a strong tendency towards re-accenting, like Swedish and Spanish. There were also some indications that age and gender has a correlation with the frequency of de-accenting in Icelandic, with young and male subjects tending to re-accent less..Zip skrárnar innihalda hljóðskrár sem teknar voru upp í sambandi við ritgerðina