Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm Universityploited. Thus, the expectation for an intonationalphrase containing for example three accentedwords, will be an alternation: focal accentuation+ non-focal accentuation + focal accentuation.The other regional varieties ofSwedish – South, Gotland, Dala, North, andFinland Swedish – turn out to be different inthis respect and make up another group. SouthSwedish, as a case in point, for a correspondingphrase with three accented words, is expectedto have equal prominence on these constituents.This means that for a speaker of South Swedish,focal accentuation is not regularly exploitedas an option distinct from regular accentuation.Figure 2 shows typical examples of aphrase containing three accented words: accentI + accent I + accent II (compound), for threefemale speakers representing East Central(Stockholm), West Central (Gothenburg) andSouth Swedish (Malmö) respectively. Note thedistinct pitch patterns of the first and secondaccent I words of the phrase in the CentralSwedish varieties – as a reflex of the distinctionbetween focal and non-focal accentuation – incontrast with the situation in South Swedish,where these two words have got the same basicpitch pattern.Intonational phrasing is expressed in differentways and more or less explicitly in the differentvarieties, partly constrained by dialectspecificfeatures of accentuation (Figure 2).The rising pitch gesture in the beginning andthe falling gesture at the end of the phrase inEast Central Swedish is an explicit way of signallingphrase edges, to be found also in variousother languages. In West Central Swedish,the rise after the accent I fall in the first word ofthe phrase could be seen as part of an initialpitch gesture, expressing that there is a continuationto follow. However, there is no fallingcounterpart at the end of the phrase, but insteada pitch rise. This rise at the end of a prominentword is analysed as part of a focal accent gestureand considered to be a characteristic featureof West Swedish intonation. In SouthSwedish, the falling gesture at the end of thephrase (like in East Central Swedish) has noregular rising counterpart in the beginning, butthere is instead a fall, which is the dialectspecificpitch realisation of accent I. All threevarieties also display a downdrift in pitch to beseen across the phrase, which is to be interpretedas a signal of coherence within an intonationalphrase.The following sections describe a smallstudy we carried out in order to gain moreknowledge about the pitch pattern variation ofphrase initial accent I in South Swedish.Figure 2. Accentuation and phrasing in varieties ofSwedish. Pitch contours of typical examples of aphrase containing three accented words for EastCentral Swedish (top), West Central Swedish (middle)and South Swedish (bottom).Speech materialThe speech material was taken from the SwedishSpeechDat (Elenius, 1999) – a speech databaseof read telephone speech of 5000 speakers,registered by age, gender, current location andself-labelled dialect type according to Elert’ssuggested 18 Swedish dialectal regions (Elert,1994). For our study, we selected a fair numberof productions of the initial intonational phrase(underlined below) of the sentence Flyget, tågetoch bilbranschen tävlar om lönsamhet ochfolkets gunst ‘Airlines, train companies and theautomobile industry are competing for profitabilityand people’s appreciation’. The targetitem was the initial disyllabic accent I word flyget.In order to cover a sufficient number (11)of varieties of South Swedish spoken in andaround defined localities (often correspondingto towns), our aim was to analyse 12 speakersfrom each variety, preferably balanced for age43