Proceedings Fonetik 2009 - Institutionen för lingvistik

Proceedings, FONETIK 2009, Dept. of Linguistics, Stockholm Universitybetween intonational varieties of Swedish (Riad1998, Bruce 2001, 2007). A compound word inSwedish contains two stresses, primary stress(ˈ) on the first element and secondary stress (ˌ)on the final element. In most varieties of Swedisha compound takes accent II. The exceptionis South Swedish where both accents can occur(Bruce, 2007). A critical issue is whether thesecondary stress of a compound is a relevantsynchronisation point for a pitch gesture or not.Figure 2 shows stylised pitch patterns of accentII compounds identifying four different shapescharacteristic of distinct regional varieties ofSwedish (Bruce 2001). The target patterns forour discussion in this paper are the two typeshaving either a single peak in connection withthe primary stress of the compound or a highplateau between the primary and the secondarystresses of the word. These two accentual typesare found mainly in South Swedish, and in theDala region and on the isle of Gotland respectively.It has been suggested that the pitch patternof an accent II compound in the Gotlandand Dala dialect types has basically the sameshape with the high pitch plateau extendingroughly from the primary to the secondarystress of the word. The specific point of interestof our contribution is to examine the idea aboutthe similarity of pitch patterns of compoundwords particularly in Gotland and Dala Swedish.Figure 2. Schematic pitch patterns of accent II compoundwords in four main intonational varieties ofSwedish (after Bruce, 2001). The first arrow marksthe CV-boundary of the primary stress, and the second/thirdarrow marks the CV-boundary of the secondarystress. In a “short” compound the twostresses are adjacent, while in a “long” compoundthe stresses are not directly adjacent.Speech material and methodThe speech material was taken from the SwedishSpeechDat (Elenius, 1999), a database containingread telephone speech. It containsspeech of 5000 speakers registered by age,gender, current location and self-labelled dialecttype according to Elert’s suggested 18Swedish dialectal regions (Elert, 1994). As targetword of our examination, we selected theinitial “long” compound /moˈbilteleˌfonen/ fromthe sentence Mobiltelefonen är nittiotalets storafluga, både bland företagare och privatpersoner.‘The mobile phone is the big hit of thenineties, both among business people and privatepersons’. Following Elert’s classification,we selected 75 productions of mobiltelefonenfrom the three dialect regions which can be labelledroughly as Gotland, Dala-Bergslagenand Upper Dalarna Swedish (25 speakers ofeach dialect).F 0 contours of all productions wereextracted, normalised for time (expressed as thepercentage of the word duration) and plotted ona semitone scale in three separate graphs: onefor each dialectal region.Tentative findingsFigure 3 shows the F 0 contours of the speakersfrom the three dialectal regions examined. Evenif there is variation to be seen among F 0 contoursof each of these graphs, there is also someconstancy to be detected. For both Gotland andDala-Bergslagen a high pitch plateau, i.e. earlyrise + high level pitch + late fall, for the compoundcan be traced. A possible difference betweenthe two dialect types may be that, whilespeakers representing Dala-Bergslagen Swedishhave a regular high pitch plateau, Gotlandspeakers tend to have more of an upsteppedpitch pattern for the plateau, i.e. early rise +high level pitch + late rise & fall.Among the speakers classified as representingUpper Dalarna Swedish there is more internalvariation of the F 0 contours to be seen.However, this variation can be dissolved asconsisting of two basic distinct pitch patterns,either a single pitch peak in connection with theprimary stress of the compound or a high pitchplateau. These two patterns would appear tohave a geographical distribution within thearea, so that the high pitch plateau is morelikely to occur towards South-East, i.e. inplaces closer to the Dala-Bergslagen dialect region.49