Past Event

“Utterance-final weakening in north-central Scandinavia.”

Josh Wilbur
(University of Freiburg)

The term “utterance-final weakening” refers to a prosodic feature found at the right periphery of certain clauses in a number of languages spoken in north central Scandinavia. This post-lexical phenomenon exists at the interface between syntax and prosody. In the talk, I will present data from Pite Saami (Uralic) and a northern Swedish dialect (Indo-European). I will discuss the phonetic-acoustic correlates and possible discourse-level functions, and even propose that it is an areal feature extending beyond these two languages.