Lexical, Pragmatic and Positional Effects on Prosody in Two Dialects of Croatian and Serbian: An Acoustic Study
type: CreativeWork
description: 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.
abstract: 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.
author: Smiljanic, Rajka
language: eng
keywords: Language, Linguistics
date published: 2015-09-25T20:50:40Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:26:18Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/82618