Introduction

Norwegian and Swedish have intonation systems with pitch accents signalling information status, as has English. However, these languages also have a binary tone contrast on the syllable with primary stress. The two terms in the opposition are referred as Accent 1 and Accent 2 (Bruce 1977). The challenge to separate the intonational tones from the lexical tones was successfully met by Bruce (1977) on the basis of the collection and analysis of a carefully composed corpus of read speech in which lexical tone, intonational focus, and position in the sentence were varied orthogonally. This work played a seminal role in the development of Pierrehumbert's 1980 autosegmental-metrical description of English, as attested by many of the contributions in his Festschrift (Horne 2000).

In section 11.2, I reproduce Bruce's analysis of Stockholm Swedish, including Gussenhoven and Bruce's (1999) modification of the analysis of compounds. Section 11.4 describes East Norwegian on the basis of Kristoffersen's (2000) account of Fretheim (1992), Fretheim and Nilsen (1991). There, I reinterpret their notion of ‘Accent Phrase’ as the stretch of speech spanned by the left-aligned L* and the right-aligned H-tone of an intonational pitch accent L*H, which implies a ‘privative’ analysis of the Norwegian tones, as in Lorentz (1995). Finally, section 11.6 tentatively suggests an account of the development of Danish stϕd from Accent 1.

A number of analyses are possible for the tone contrast, in part depending on the facts of the language variety in question. First, the opposition may be between two tones, a non-privative analysis, or between tone (Accent 2) and absence of tone (Accent 1), a privative analysis.