Prosodic Parameters in a Variety of Regional Danish Standard Languages, with a View towards Swedish and German

Abstract Acoustic analysis of six different regional variants of Standard Danish, two forms of Swedish and two of German divides the ten into two major categories: those that signal sentence intonation function by local cues and those that do it by global means. The purely global types are also those that have no default sentence accents, and which signal focus by reduction of the surroundings rather than by boosting of the focussed element (a focal accent proper). A specific final completion cue is restricted to the local intonation types and is there an entity separate from that which cues prosodic terminal or nonterminal status. The implication for models of intonation is discussed.