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Stress Alternations and Vowel Length: New Evidence for an Underlying Nine-Vowel System in Swedish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2008

Stig Eliasson
Stig Eliasson
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, Uppsala University, Box 513, S-757 20 Uppsala, Sweden
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Abstract

This paper presents new empirical evidence for a process description of quantity in Swedish. Like most other Germanic languages, Swedish possesses a rich array of stress-governing derivational suffixes which cause stress and length alternations in the stems to which they are attached. Such alternations bear crucially on the choice between a unit-oriented or process-oriented approach to Swedish phonology. Inasmuch as 18-vowel-phoneme solutions presuppose lexically inherent vocalic length, they result in a multitude of morphophonemic alternations between long and short vowels. In process solutions, such quantitative alternations follow predictably from independently motivated rules. These results have important implications for the description of the phonemic system, phonotactics, rule component, and morphological structure of the language. The conclusions are directly valid also for Norwegian.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , December 1985 , pp. 101 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985

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