This is a comprehensive account of the phonetic and phonological properties of Norwegian. The author considers the structure of the lexicon and the principles by which the ordering of sounds in Norwegian can be defined. He then discusses word phonology and its interaction with lexicalstructure; the principles of syllabification; the placement of stress; the tonal accents characteristic of most dialects; intonation; and connected speech. Dr Kristoffersen concludes with an analysis of the complex relations between written and spoken language in Norway.A the end of the fourteenth century, Norway, having previously been an independent kingdom, became by conquest a province of Denmark and remained so for three centuries. In1814, as part of the fall-out from the Napoleonic wars, the country became a largely independent nation within the monarchy ofSweden. By this time, however, Danish had become the language of government, commerce, and education, as well as of the middle and upper classes. Nationalistic Norwegians sought to re-establish native identity by creating and promulgating a new language based partly on rural dialects and partly onOld Norse. The upper and middle classes sought to retain a form of Norwegian close to Danish that would be intelligible to themselves and to their neighbours in Sweden and Denmark. The controversy has gone on ever since. One result is that the standard dictionaries of Norwegian ignore pronunciation,for no version can be counted as 'received'. Another is that there has been considerable variety and change in Norwegian over the last 180 years, all of which is well documented. In this pioneering account of Norwegian phonology, Gjert Kristoffersen mines the evidence to present an original analysisof the ways in which the sounds and meanings of competing languages change and evolve.The book is written within the framework of generative phonology, making use of insights derived from Optimality Theory. Its main, and successful, purpose is to present the phonological system of Norwegian clearly and concisely.

A the end of the fourteenth century, Norway, having previously been an independent kingdom, became by conquest a province of Denmark and remained so for three centuries. In1814, as part of the fall-out from the Napoleonic wars, the country became a largely independent nation within the monarchy of Sweden. By this time, however, Danish had become the language of government, commerce, and education, as well as of the middle and upper classes. Nationalistic Norwegians sought to reestablish native identity by creating and promulgating a new language based partly on rural dialects and partly on Old Norse. The upper and middle classes sought to retain a form of Norwegian close to Danish that would be intelligible to themselves and to their neighbours in Sweden and Denmark. The controversy has gone on ever since. One result is that the standard dictionaries of Norwegian ignore pronunciation, for no version can be counted as 'received'. Another is that there has been considerable variety and change in Norwe

This book presents a comprehensive, contrastive account of the phonological structures and characteristics of Icelandic and Faroese. It is written for Nordic linguists and theoretical phonologists interested in what the languages reveal about phonological structure and phonological change and the relation between morphology, phonology, and phonetics. The book is divided into five parts. In the first Professor Árnason provides the theoretical and historical context of his investigation. Icelandic and Faroese originate from the West-Scandinavian or Norse spoken in Norway, Iceland and part of the Scottish Isles at the end of the Viking Age. The modern spoken languages are barely intelligible to each other and, despite many common phonological characteristics, exhibit differences that raise questions about their historical and structural relation and about phonological change more generally. Separate parts are devoted to synchronic analysis of the sounds of the languages, their phonological oppositions, syllabic structure and phonotactics, lexical morphophonemics, rhythmic structure, intonation and postlexical variation. The book draws on the author's and others' published work and presents the results of original research in Faroese and Icelandic phonology.

he book is divided into four parts: the first looks at the design, compilation, and use of phonological corpora, while the second looks at specific applications, including examples from French and Norwegian phonology, child phonological development, and second language acquisition. Part 3 looks at the tools and methods used, such as Praat and EXMARaLDA, and the final part examines a number of currently available phonological corpora in various languages, including LANCHART, LeaP, and IViE. It will appeal not only to those working with phonological corpora, but also to researchers and students of phonology and phonetics more generally, as well as to all those interested in language variation, dialectology, first and second language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. --

R. G. Popperwell provides a fascinating and highly accessible guide to the correct pronunciation of Norwegian.

This book presents a comprehensive account of the phonology of Swedish, describes its history, segmental phonology, lower prosodic phonology, stress and tone, morphology-phonology interactions, higher prosodic phonology, and intonation, Its approach is data-oriented and, insofar as possible, theory-neutral.

Tonal accents in Norwegian: Phonology, morphology and lexical specification breaks from the traditional and contemporary analyses of word accent in North Germanic with the goal of providing a more simplex and unified morphophonological analysis of word accents in North Germanic. It gives the facts of accent distribution in Standard East Norwegian, discusses how three of the more recent and most important analyses of accent assignment in Norwegian and Swedish deal with these facts and provides an alternative analysis. Given that many Accent 1 words are loans, the book also discusses how loanword incorporated in East Norwegian and other North Germanic dialects and the question of why loans predominantly bear Accent 1. Although the focus of the book is word accent assignment in Standard East Norwegian, it also refers to Central Swedish and Old Norse. In this way, it accounts for many aspects of accent assignment, the true nature of which might have gone undetected had only one of the North Germanic language been taken into consideration. The book also dedicates one chapter to the phonetics of the tonal contrast. Addressing the question of how perceptually salient the tonal contrast is.

Featuring the most complete and up-to-date description of the phonology of German presently available, this book applies recent models of phonological theory, putting particular emphasis on the interaction of morphology and phonology. It focuses on the present-day standard language, but includes discussions of other variants and registers.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the phonology and morphology of Arabic. It is a pioneering work of scholarship, based on the author's research in the region. Arabic is a Semitic language spoken by some 250 million people in an area stretching from Morocco in the West to parts of Iran in the East. Apart from its great intrinsic interest, the importance of the language for phonological and morphological theory lies, as the author shows, in its rich root-and-pattern morphology and its large set of guttural consonants. Dr Watson focuses on two eastern dialects, Cairene and San'ani. Cairene is typical of an advanced urban Mediterranean dialect and has a cultural importance throughout the Arab world; it is also the variety learned by most foreign speakers of Arabic. San'ani, spoken in Yemen, is representative of a conservative peninsula dialect. In addition the book makes extensive reference to other dialects as well as to classical and Modern Standard Arabic. The volume opens with an overview of the history and varieties of Arabic, and of the study of phonology within the Arab linguistic tradition. Successive chapters then cover dialectal differences and similarities, and the position of Arabic within Semitic; the phoneme system and the representation of phonological features; the syllable and syllabification; word stress; derivational morphology; inflectional morphology; lexical phonology; and post-lexical phonology. The Phonology and Morphology of Arabic will be of great interest to Arabists and comparative Semiticists, as well as to phonologists, morphologists, and linguists more generally.