Prosody, productivity and word structure: the stød pattern of Modern Danish

Abstract

Parts of a new model of phonology-morphology-lexicon interplay is presented to account for the complex distribution of the Modern Danish stød (a syllabic prosody). Stød, which is sometimes productive for speakers, is analysed as a signal of the second mora of bimoraic syllables not subject to the Non-Stød Principle (NSP). The author's cross-language model for Systematically Graded Productivity of Endings (section 3) is shown to account for the application of NSP (section 4), and a detailed typology of lexemes with respect to stød-alternations, derived from the model, is presented in section 5. In section 6, a simple case of stød-alternations in inflection, viz. regular plurals of nouns, is given, and section 7 exemplifies stød and non-stød as a key to morphology for the addressee.