Lexical, Pragmatic, and Positional Effects on Prosody in Two Dialects of Croatian and Serbian: An Acoustic Study

Abstract

Briefly, the results of the acoustic studies conducted show that there is a difference between the two dialects in their phonological properties: as mentioned, the Belgrade dialect has a pitch-accent and vowel length contrast while the Zagreb dialect does not. Lexical pitch-accent and vowel length contrasts are found to influence the expression of pragmatic focus: the phonemic contrasts are enlarged in narrow focus. Tonal crowding in the phrase-final positions additionally affects tonal alignment regardless of the presence or absence of the lexical pitch-accent contrast. These results have implications for the typology of the prosodic systems, for Intonational Phonology, and for phonetic implementation of phonological contrasts.

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