Word Prosody in Slovene from a Typological Perspective

Abstract

Slovene is, along with Serbo-Croatian, an example of a pitch-accent language, one of only two remaining in the Slavic language family. Most of the literature on Slovene the data on the word-prosody features of this language are taken from the standardized system, a somewhat constructed entity based on the pitch-accent system of selected dialects. The present survey attempts to give a coherent structural description of the word-prosodic phenomena as they are manifested in the extraordinarily variegated Slovene dialects; these in turn are compared to the standardized system as well as, where relevant, to typological similar systems found in Croatian dialects. In addition, the key innovations that shaped the prosodic systems of Slovene dialects are discussed. Slovene emerges as a special set of types that share a tendency to concentrate prosodic distinctions -- pitch and quantity -- in the one stressed syllable of each accented word. Furthermore, these pitch and quantity distinctions in many dialects have become rephonologized as vowel-quantity distinctions. A few aberrant local dialets have gained new pitch distinctions or unstressed quantity distinctions.