This is a continuation of the Norwegian and Swedish tone accents that are presented in Accents: highlighting words by changing the tone. In this section, we present two different kinds of accent.
Although Central Swedish, like the other Swedish varieties, has only one pair of tone accents, there are no less than four accent melodies: there are two different melodies for accent 1 words, and two different melodies for accent 2 words. The choice between the melodies depends on the level of prominence of the accented word: does the speaker want to signal the accented word as conveying “important” information or as conveying “very important” information?
We will adopt a recent suggestion in Swedish research and call the “very important” accents “big accents”, see below. It is also suggested to call the “normal” accents “small accents” to make the difference clear. We update the prominence levels from table 2 from above accordingly:
Table 3. Degrees of prominence: now including two different levels for accents
|
Degree of stress |
Signal |
Phonetic features |
|
unstressed syllable |
Not very noteworthy information |
|
|
secondary stressed syllable |
noteworthy information |
Stressed syllables: longer duration, louder and clearer speech sounds, long vowel sounds can be used |
|
primary stressed syllable |
rather important information |
|
|
Accented syllable (small accent) |
important information |
stress + accent melody (tonal movements) |
|
big accent (Norwegian literature: focus accent) |
very important information |
Central Swedish: Other Swedish varieties: stress + enhanced tonal movements Norwegian varieties: a variety of different cues, including enhancing tonal movements |
In literature on intonation, the “very important” accent is traditionally called “focus accent” (and it still is still called fokusaksent in the Trondheim Model of Intonation). However, without going into the fine details of focus theory, the term “focus accent” has proven to be a problematic term for Central Swedish. That is the reason why the terms “small accent” vs. “big accent” have recently been suggested in Swedish literature. We follow that suggestion, and to keep to one terminology, we use these terms for both Swedish and Norwegian.
Swedish big accents
The change between small and big accents in Central Swedish is briefly illustrated in utterance (26b) (translation of the utterance in (26a)). There are accents on four words. The first three accents are small accents, the fourth is a “big accent”. It makes sense to highlight the last concept äldrevården (“elderlycare”) the most because this topic is completely new to the conversation. Robots, on the other hand, is already a topic between the conversation partners. Therefore, it does not take that much effort to make the listener think of robots, but elderlycare could need some extra highlighting to make the listener aware of the fact that there is a new concept to activate.
You can listen to the utterance in (26b) as a whole, but also to the individual accented words TYcker, RObotar, ANvändas and ÄLdreomsorgen separately. (Accented syllables are marked by capital letters in the text.) The last word, ÄLdreomsorgen contains a big accent 2 rise in the second part of the word, and to make that big accent rise really clear, you can also listen to the two parts of this compound separately: ÄLdre- and -omsorgen.
(26) a. Tycker du att robotar ska användas i äldreomsorgen?
"Do you think that robots should be used in elderlycare?”
b. Visualization of the small and big accents in the Central Swedish question in (26a).
- TYcker: small accent 1 = the accent melody starts with a high tone followed by a small, fast fall. If you listen carefully, you can hear that this the tone of the first syllable TY- is higher than the tone used on the second syllable -ker.
- RObotar: small accent 1 = the accent melody starts with a high tone followed by a small, fast fall. If you listen carefully, you can hear that the accented syllable RO- has a high tone, whereas the two following syllables -bo- and -tar are pronounced each with a lower tone.
- ANvändas: small accent 2 = the accent melody starts with a high tone followed by a small, slow fall. If you listen carefully, you can hear that the accented syllable AN- has a high tone, whereas the two following syllables -vän- and -das are pronounced each with a lower tone.
- ÄLdreomsorgen: big accent 2 = the accent melody starts with a high tone followed by a small, slow fall. In the end of the word, there is again a high tone on the last secondary stressed syllable, in this case on the second last syllable -sor-. This rise only takes place in the big accent 2 melody and distinguishes it from the small accent 2 melody.
You can also listen to just the first part äldre-, which starts with the accented syllable.
And you can listen to only the last part, -omsorgen, which contains the big accent 2 rise in the middle.
The distinction between the small accent and the big accent is also assumed for other varieties of Swedish, but the difference is then not signaled by changing the accent melody. In Scania Swedish, the big accent melody is enhanced, i.e. the accent melody becomes wider and contains more tones (for a presentation of the Eastern Scania Swedish tone accents, see Accents: highlighting words by changing the tone, example (18)).
Since the difference between small and big accents in Scania Swedish is a matter of degree, it is much more difficult to say what accents are big and what accents are small. For example, there may also be accents in the middle! Are they then big or small?
The classification is made even more difficult by the fact that in more casual ways of speaking, not very much effort is put into a clear pronunciation, which means that the tonal movements of accent melodies can be very small to begin with. In example (27), the Scania Swedish pronunciation of the utterance in (26a) is presented. One of the project members, who is a native speaker of this variety, estimates the accents on RObotar (“robots”) and ÄLdreomsorgen (“elderlycare”) to be stronger accents than the other accents and thus to be big accents, whereas the other accents then are small accents.
(27) Visualization of the small and big accents in the Scania Swedish pronunciation of the question in (26a).
Norwegian big accents
In Norwegian, there is also a distinction between small (normal) and big accents (Norwegian fokusaksent). Many different cues can be used to make the difference (although no change of accent melody; this seems to be a unique feature of Central Swedish). The choice of cues varies with the regional variety in question. In the Southeast Norwegian pronunciation of the utterance in (26)- (27) (translation of the Norwegian question in (28a) below), the big accent 1 melodies on ROboter and ELdreomsorgen can be recognized by the high final accent tone at the end of the accent group: RObo[-ter]high and ELdreomsor-[gen]high. The speaker produces to final big accent groups because he first ends the question after roboter, and then discovers that the question was not finished yet. Therefore, he adds a second final big accent group. (For the explanation of accent groups, see Accents groups = chunks of speech formed by accented melodies).
Again, this is spoken in a rather casual way, and the small accents on HVA (“what”), DU (“you”) and BRUken (“the use”) are signaled by small, sometimes hardly recognizable tonal movements. The small accents are above all recognizable through the stress features, i.e. the rhythm.
The rhythm is important in (28) also from another perspective: by coincidence, all the accent groups in (28) have tone accent 1. In the Southeast Norwegian tone accent 1 melody, the most noticeable tonal movement comes towards the end, on the last syllable of the accent group. In contrast, Swedish and Danish speakers probably expect the important tonal movements to be centered around the accented syllable. The Southeast Norwegian tone accent 1 melody is extra clear in the big accent groups Roboter and ELdreomsorgen: the accented syllables are spoken in a slightly lower tone than the previous syllable, but after that, the tone stays the same until the last syllable of the accent group, on which the melody rises to a high tone. There is a syllable-by-syllable illustration of the accent melody of i ELdreomsorgen in (28c), and you can also listen only to this accent group in isolation..
(28) a. Så hva tenker du om… bruken av eh roboter i eldreomsorgen?
so what think you of the use of eh robots in elderlycare
"So what do you think of the use of eh robots? in elderlycare?"
b. Visualization of the small and big accents in Southeast Norwegian:
c. The big accent 1 melody in the last accent group i ELreomsorgen:
|
|
Accent Group (big accent 1 = rising melody) |
||||
|
prelude |
accented syllable |
|
|
|
|
|
i |
EL- |
-dre- |
-om- |
-sorg- |
-en |
|
relaxed tone height |
low |
low |
low |
low |
high |
Danish accents
In Danish literature on intonation, it is assumed that Danish speakers do not mark the last accent of an utterance by giving it an extra strong, big accent, like the Swedish and Norwegian speakers do in (26)-(28). The accent at the end of Danish utterance endings is equally strong as, but not stronger than, the accents preceding it. Decide for yourself what you think in(29b):
(29) a. Synes du man skal bruge robotter i ældreplejen?
"Do you think you should use robots in elderlycare?"
b. Visualization of the small and big accents in Copenhagen Danish:
However, you can of course signal emphasis in Danish if needed. In the utterance What studyprogram do you take?, the most important information, namely STUdieretning (“studyprogram”), is placed in the middle of the utterance. The second accent on the verb går (“take”) is much less important for getting the gist of the utterance.
The basic strategy for signaling the importance of an emphasized word in Danish is then not to make the emphasized accent extra strong; instead, following accents on less important words are diminished. As you can hear and see in (30), the tonal movement of the verb går is small in comparison to the tonal movement of the previous noun STUdieretning:
(30) a. Hvilken studieretning går du på?
what study orientation go you on
“What studyprogram do you take?”
Sometimes, the accent group following an accent group with emphasis completely loses its accent melody and is spoken in a flat tone all through. This is called deaccentuation. You can hear an example of that in Question-Word Questions: More examples, example (42-1b).
Summary
Accents are tonal movements that signal “important information” to the listener. In this section, we have introduced two levels of important information: important information and very important information. Small accents signal important information, and big accents signal very important information.
Very often, the last expression in an utterance is marked for conveying very important information, and thus the last accent is often the strongest big accent of the utterance in Swedish and Norwegian utterance (26-27).
The difference between “important” and “very important” is signaled by changing the tone accent melody in Central Swedish: words that convey important information get a “small accent”, and words that convey very important information get a “big accent”. In Scania Swedish, the difference between small and big accents is made by enhancing the tonal movement of the big accents.
In Norwegian, enhancing the tonal movement of the big accent melody is one possible cue for signaling big accents in many regional varieties, but depending on the variety, also other kinds of cues are also used.
In Danish, there is no default marking of the last expression of an utterance as being extra important. The last expression has the same kind of accent as previous important words, not stronger in any way. However, expressions that convey very important information in the middle of an utterance can be “emphasized”. Then immediately following accents are usually diminished in their tonal movements so that the previous accent becomes bigger in retrospect.
References
Abrahamsen, Jardar Eggesbø. 2006. "Focus in the Herøy dialect." In: Bruce, Gösta & Horne, Merle (Eds.), Nordic Prosody. Proceedings of the IXth Conference, Lund 2004. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 9–18.
Abrahamsen, Jardar Eggesbø. 2019. "Høgtoneforskuving til etterleddet i samansette ord: sunnmørsk og litt om nordnorsk." In: Kristoffersen, Gjert, Hognestad, Jan K., Kinn, Torodd & Lohndal, Terje. (Eds.) Fonologi, sosiolingvistikk og vitenskapsteori. Festskrift til Gjert Kristoffersen. Oslo: Novus forlag, 25-44.
Alm, Maria. (Forthcoming). “The Frog Melody: A variation of the Scania Swedish tone accent 2 melody to encourage children. For: TAI 2021, The 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation, Dec 6-9 2021, Sønderborg, Denmark.
Alm, Maria, Abrahamsen, Jardar Eggesbø, Abelin, Åsa, Albertsen, Egil & Koreman, Jacques. (Forthcoming). “Parameters of tonal variation in and between three Scandinavian languages.” For: TAI 2021, The 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation, Dec 6-9 2021, Sønderborg, Denmark.
Bruce, Gösta. 1998. Allmän och svensk prosodi. Praktisk Lingvistik 16. Lund: Institutionen för Lingvistik.
Grønnum, Nina. 1990. “Prosodic parameters in a variety of regional Danish standard languages, with a view towards Swedish and German.” In: Phonetica 47, 182–214. doi: 10.1159/000261862
Grønnum, Nina. 2005. Fonetik og fonologi: Almen og dansk. Copenhagen: Akademisk forlag.
Hansson, Petra. 2003. Prosodic Phrasing in Spontaneous Swedish. Lund: Studentlitteratur.
Kristoffersen, Gjert. 2000. The Phonology of Norwegian. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.
Myrberg, Sara & Riad, Tomas. 2015. “The prosodic hierarchy of Swedish.” In: Nordic Journal of Linguistics, suppl. Prosody in the Nordic Languages; Cambridge Vol. 38, Iss. 2: 115-147. DOI:10.1017/S0332586515000177
Trondheim Model of Intonation, developed by Thorstein Fretheim and Randi A. Nilsen. See Kristoffersen, Gjert. 2000. The Phonology of Norwegian. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, Ch. 10.