The Schedule: Day 2

Tonal accent – a two-way contrast in the realization of stressed syllables – shows complex distributions in (Urban East) Norwegian compounds (Kristoffersen 2000, Wetterlin 2010, Eik et al. 2024). In native stems, which are typically either mono- or disyllabic with initial stress, monosyllables always receive Accent 1 and disyllables typically Accent 2, but the situation changes in complex ways upon compounding.

On the one hand, linking elements, such as -e and -s, seem to delimit the domain of tonal accent assignment. For instance, examples such as 1dag-s-lys ‘day light’ and 1land-s-lag ‘national team’ (i.e., land-team) suggest that the monosyllabic first members of the compounds, respectively dag ‘day’ and land ‘land, country’ determine the tonal accent. Additionally, when compounds are linked with -e, as in 2land-e-veg ‘country road’, they can now receive accent 2; this is likely based on the disyllabic combination of root and linking element land-e, which creates the preferred disyllabic Accent-2 domain found in underived words. When there is no linker, however, some compounds receive tonal accents based on the first member, e.g., 1ski-stav ‘ski pole’, where others require both members to contribute to a disyllabic minimum size for accent 2, as with 2dag-bok ‘journal’ (1dag predictably receives monosyllabic Accent 1 in isolation). These patterns are arguably root-specific, as shown in the contrast between 1ball-kjole ‘ball gown’ and 2ball-kjole ‘a dress made of balls’. There are finally some roots, kveld ‘evening’, loft ‘attic’, and omn ‘ovn’ that form compounds liked with -s. which would otherwise induce Accent 1 in these cases, but corresponding forms nevertheless productively occur with accent 2, as in 2kveld-s-mat ‘evening meal’, 2loft-s-rom ‘attic room’, and 2omn-s-dør ‘oven door.’ Tonal accent patterns accordingly reveal a conundrum: some cases, their assignment is restricted to the first phonological word of the compound, but in others it is computed over two phonological words.

We approach the issue from a metrical perspective (Morén-Duóllja 2013; Iosad 2016; Kaldhol & Köhnlein 2021; Eik et al. 2024) and treat the distinction between the accents as a moraic foot (Accent 1) and a syllabic foot (Accent 2). While this approach derives the basic patterns in underived words in a principled way, we show how emerging insights can be extended to model compound accentuation. Elaborating on earlier insights in Kaldhol & Köhnlein and Eik et al., we argue that the compound patterns follow from an intricate interplay of compound-induced binarity at the prosodic-word level (overriding the necessity for foot binarity, as even more clearly evidenced in Swedish), lexical metrical specifications, as well as certain morphosyntactic properties of linking elements that, intuitively speaking, create a looser connection between the two members of a compound than we find in other types of compounds.

Taken together, these patterns show how representational and grammatical phonological properties can interact with morpho-syntactic considerations in complex ways that are still modular in kind.

References

Eik. Ragnhild, David Natvig & Michael T. Putnam. 2024. Syntax and tonal accent: Deriving ‘affixes’ and ‘clitics’ in Norwegian compounds. Oral presentation: Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference. University of Indiana, 26–27 April

Iosad, Pavel. 2016. Prosodic structure and suprasegmental features: Short-vowel stød in Danish. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 19: 221–268.

Kaldhol, Nina & Björn Köhnlein. 2021. North Germanic tonal accent is equipollent and metrical: Evidence from compounding. In Proceedings of the 2020 Annual Meeting on Phonology,

Kristoffersen, Gjert. 2000. The phonology of Norwegian. Oxford: Oxford University press.

Morén-Duóllja, Bruce. 2013. The prosody of Swedish underived nouns: No tones required. Nordlyd 40(1): 196–248.

Wetterlin, Alison. 2010. Tonal accents in Norwegian: Phonology, morphology, and lexical specification. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Among the different matching constraints that characterize Across-The-Board (ATB) movement, Case matching is perhaps the most well-studied: broadly speaking, ATB-movement  of syntactically distinct Cases is normally disallowed. Yet syncretism often seems to circumvent this constraint: in many languages, ATB-movement of syntactically distinct Cases becomes possible if the filler is syncretic for the mismatching Cases (see e.g. Dyła 1984, Franks 1995, Citko 2005).

We document a phenomenon whereby ATB movement is impossible despite systematic shared identity. Modern Greek has three classes of non-structural genitives, distinguished in previous literature by their behavior under cliticization/clitic doubling and the availability of PP alternants. Interestingly, when these three classes combine under ATB-movement, not all combinations are licit, even though all three genitive classes are systematically identical at the level of exponence.

We show that syncretism fails to have an ameliorating effect because the offending structures cannot be generated to begin with. Independent diagnostics suggest a categorial split within Greek genitives: while some are plain DPs, others are DPs encapsulated within a null-headed PP. Because Greek ATB-movement is independently subject to a category-matching constraint and Greek does not allow P-stranding, this analysis successfully reduces the offending ATB configurations to violations of category matching. The analysis further unifies these newly-observed ATB facts with the previously noted but hitherto unexplained asymmetries between genitives with respect to cliticization/clitic-doubling and PP alternation.

The results suggest that two distinct representations of non-structural Case (a plain DP and an encapsulated DP) must be countenanced; they also highlight the role of category matching in constraining ATB and related constructions (notably converging with Hewett 2025). Time permitting, we will discuss other corners of Greek that exhibit the same kinds of patterns beyond genitives; extend the domain of inquiry to parasitic gaps and Right Node Raising; and speculate on what these facts might suggest for the role of formal identity in ATB movement more broadly.