A bird's eye view over a Scandinavian isogloss : exponence of definiteness (in word prosody)

Abstract

The articulation of definiteness in the Scandinavian languages displays an intricate and complex pattern where all levels of grammar are involved. In addition, there is considerable variation at all of these levels, not only across languages and varieties, but also across different constructions within a single variety. In the first half of the paper, the rich information already available on these topics is first put together. In the second half, the variation found in the prosodic realization of definiteness at the word level receives an optimality-theoretic treatment in more detail. The goal is to reduce the quite intriguing variation in the prosody of definiteness to the factorial typology of two structural constraints, namely ONSET and ALIGNMENT(suffix, foot), when everything else remains (more or less) equal.

Keywords

• definiteness
• Scandinavian accent
• word prosody
• factorial typology
• variation
• optimality