Lexical, Pragmatic and Positional Effects on Prosody in Two Dialects of Croatian and Serbian: An Acoustic Study

Briefly, the results of the acoustic studies conducted show that there is a difference between the two dialects in their phonological properties: as mentioned, the Belgrade dialect has a pitch-accent and vowel length contrast while the Zagreb dialect does not. Lexical pitch-accent and vowel length contrasts are found to influence the expression of pragmatic focus: the phonemic contrasts are enlarged in narrow focus. Tonal crowding in the phrase-final positions additionally affects tonal alignment regardless of the presence or absence of the lexical pitch-accent contrast. These results have implications for the typology of the prosodic systems, for Intonational Phonology, and for phonetic implementation of phonological contrasts.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Linguistics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Smiljanic, Rajka

Contributors dc:contributor

• Cole, Jennifer S.

• Language, Linguistics

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3070438

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/82618