Intonational Contour Alignment in Saaremaa and Standard Estonian107-112
Intonational Contour Alignment in Saaremaa and Standard Estonian

Summary/Abstract: The dialect of Estonian normally singled out as differing from the standard in its “sing-songy” melody is that of the island of Saaremaa. The characteristic intonation of this variety is attributed to historic contacts with Swedish and has been shown to be phonetically manifested in differences in peak alignment. The present paper extends the analysis of two previous studies (Asu 2004a; 2005) dealing with tonal alignment in the Saaremaa variety by concentrating on the study of the nucleus in declarative read sentences.The nucleus in Standard Estonian is often low and level, the pattern which in autosegmental-metrical analysis of intonation is labelled as H+L*. The delay of intonation peaks which implies a rightward shift in Saaremaa Estonian represents a trend towards lower pitch on the accented syllable. It is tested here whether this shift to the right precludes a distinct low accentuation. It appears that this is not the case and that both intonation patterns are distinct also in the Saaremaa variety. The finding suggests that the peak delay is a local phenomenon involving specific pitch events rather than a global displacement of the whole intonation contour.

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