The tone bearing unit in Swedish and Norwegian tonology

Abstract

In Scandinavian tonology two views exist with respect to how tones are associated with the segmental string. The first is the orthodox, autosegmental view that all tones are autosegmentally associated with a tone bearing unit, which must be either a syllable or a mora, subject to dialect variation. Most recent analyses of Norwegian tonal accent are based on this premise. The second is the view first proposed by Bruce (1987) that only stressed syllables should be counted as tone bearing units in Swedish and Norwegian, a view that entails that other tones will be left either floating or concatenated with the linked tone. They are thereby left indirectly associated with the segmental string. In this article, data from Norwegian are discussed that suggest that the more canonical autosegmental view is correct, at least for the dialects under discussion.