Stress in Icelandic

Abstract

The author sets out to reconsider the relationships between stress and quantity in Icelandic. He comes to the conclusion that since in Icelandic the same line separates stress from non-stress and the long from the short, there is no need to introduce both length and stress into the phonological description of this language. The only objective criterion of classifying Icelandic syllables is the so-called quantitative peak. Icelandic, as well as all the other Germanic languages and Russian, shows that stress does not just mark off a syllable as a physical entity; it rather turns it into a plaything of other forces: phonematic or prosodic, as the case may be.

The vocative and its kin: marking function through prosody

“…We will distinguish between stress (prominence relations) and intonational tunes (pitch contours), as is customary in intonational phonology (Ladd 1996;Liberman 1975;Pierrehumbert 1980). As is well known, stress can be cued independently of pitch, e.g.…”