Tomas Riad (colloquium abstract)

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Morphological distribution of tone in Swedish

Tomas Riad
University of Stockholm and Research Fellow, Swedish Academy

ABSTRACT

The tonal so-called accents in North Germanic are often taken to constitute a privative distinction where accent 2 (grave) is marked and accent 1 (acute) is default, that is absence of a word tone (Rischel 1963, Bruce 1977, Riad 1998). Recently, this view has been challenged by Lahiri, Wetterlin & Jšnsson-Steiner (2005), who maintain that accent 2 is default for polysyllabic forms while accent 1 is lexically specified. In this talk I defend the traditional view and conclude that, on grounds of distribution, accent 2 must be lexically represented, hence marked. The argument warrants a closer look at the organization of the prosodic word in Swedish, which shows that the lexical representation of accent 2 can most often be localized to suffixes, while its realization typically occurs in roots.