The prosody of contrastive topics in Southern Swedish

This paper presents a pilot study on the prosodic marking of a contrastive topic in Southern Swedish. A test sentence was elicited in three experimental conditions: initial focus; final focus; contrastive topic (initial word) plus focus (final word). F0 patterns were analysed in recordings of 10 speakers. A majority of the speakers distinguished clearly between the conditions, but speakers employed different strategies. The most common one involved modifying the range and/or level of the F0 patterns given by the lexical pitch accents. Another frequent strategy involved a rising pitch accent on the initial word, where the lexical pitch accent would normally stipulate a fall. This result was unexpected and indicates that Southern Swedish sentence intonation might be more complex than typically assumed.