This book presents a comprehensive, contrastive account of the phonological structures and characteristics of Icelandic and Faroese. It is written for Nordic linguists and theoretical phonologists interested in what the languages reveal about phonological structure and phonological change and the relation between morphology, phonology, and phonetics. The book is divided into five parts. In the first Professor Arnason provides the theoretical and historical context of his investigation. Icelandic and Faroese originate from the West-Scandinavian or Norse spoken in Norway, Iceland and part of the Scottish Isles at the end of the Viking Age. The modern spoken languages are barely intelligible to each other and, despite many common phonological characteristics, exhibit differences that raise questions about their historical and structural relation and about phonological change more generally. Separate parts are devoted to synchronic analysis of the sounds of the languages, their phonological oppositions, syllabic structure and phonotactics, lexical morphophonemics, rhythmic structure, intonation and postlexical variation. The book draws on the author's and others' published work and presents the results of original research in Faroese and Icelandic phonology.

Kristjan Arnason is the author of several major works on Icelandic language, including a two-volume work on Icelandic linguistics, published in 1980 and a handbook of Icelandic phonology, published in 2005. His publications in English include Quantity in Historical Phonology: Icelandic and Related Cases (CUP 1980), The Rhythm of Drottkvaett and other Old Icelandic Metres (University of Iceland 1991), as well as articles in journals such as Journal of Linguistics, Nordic Journal Linguistics, Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Lingua.

Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Abbreviations	p. xv
The historical and theoretical setting
The Two Languages and their Historical Relation	p. 3
The genetic relation: 'Proto-West Nordic'	p. 3
West Nordic obstruents	p. 4
West Nordic sonorants	p. 6
West Nordic vowels	p. 7
Diphthongs and semivowels	p. 8
Prosodic structure	p. 8
The Historical Development	p. 11
Quantity and prosodic structure	p. 12
Overlong (superheavy) syllables and their development	p. 15
The components of the quantity shift	p. 17
Quality changes in the Icelandic vowel system	p. 20
Faroese vowel developments	p. 23
The short diphthongs	p. 25
The West Nordic consonant shift	p. 26
New postvocalic stops	p. 28
The skerping and hiatus	p. 31
Systemic arrangements and types of syllables	p. 33
Theoretical Preliminaries to the Synchronic Analysis	p. 35
Phonological levels of representation	p. 35
Alphabets for phonological representation	p. 39
Segments and distinctions	p. 40
Phonological primes	p. 41
Analysing diphthongization	p. 43
The representation of time and precedence	p. 47
Saturation and fission in West Nordic diphthongs	p. 48
The modern diphthongal systems	p. 51
The modern sound systems
The Icelandic Vowel Colours and Diphthongs	p. 57
The Icelandic vowel system	p. 57
The monophthongal units	p. 57
The phonetic description of the vowel sounds	p. 60
Analysing the monophthongal colours	p. 61
The diphthongs as branching phonemic units	p. 62
Diphthongs and hiatus	p. 65
The vowels of non-initial syllables	p. 66
Faroese Vowels and Diphthongs	p. 68
An overview	p. 68
The inventory of vowels	p. 68
The 'long' and 'short' systems	p. 70
The phonetic and phonological analysis of the Faroese monophthongs and diphthongs	p. 74
The vowel qualities	p. 74
Analysing the Faroese diphthongs	p. 76
More on dialect variation and vowel systems	p. 79
Hiatus phenomena in Faroese	p. 80
Intervocalic glides	p. 80
Raising in hiatus	p. 82
One or two syllables	p. 85
The unstressed vowels of Faroese	p. 86
The vowel qualities	p. 86
The syllable types	p. 88
Dialects and morphology in unstressed vowel merger	p. 90
The postlexical reduction and syncope	p. 94
Coping with the variation: a folk-linguistic anecdote from Tórshavn	p. 96
Icelandic Consonants	p. 98
An overview	p. 98
The stops	p. 99
Places of articulation	p. 99
On palatals and velars	p. 100
The fortis-lenis opposition	p. 103
The fricatives	p. 106
The sonorants	p. 109
Summary: the classes of consonants and their element analysis	p. 111
Faroese Consonant Segments	p. 114
An overview	p. 114
The fortis and lenis plosives	p. 118
The phonological correlation	p. 118
'Hard' and 'soft' dialects in Faroese	p. 118
The fricatives	p. 122
Initial fricatives	p. 122
Word-internal fricatives and glides	p. 123
Sonorants	p. 124
The element analysis of the Faroese system	p. 124
Systemic relations and syllabic structure
Systemic Relations in Vowels	p. 129
Trends towards a diasystem in Icelandic	p. 129
The 'new' diphthongs	p. 129
A context-free merger in the 'long' system	p. 132
The interplay of merger and diphthongization	p. 133
The 'long/open' and 'short/closed' correspondence	p. 134
The Faroese vowel systems	p. 135
The polysystemic structure	p. 135
On prominence	p. 138
The element analysis of reduction: limits on information in restricted environments	p. 140
Conclusion: systemic relations in vowel systems	p. 142
Syllable Structure and Phonotactics	p. 144
Syllable structure in Icelandic	p. 144
Motivating the syllable	p. 144
The subsyllabic constituents	p. 145
The Icelandic length rule	p. 148
Half length and overlength	p. 149
Emphatic stress on non-initial syllables	p. 151
Faroese syllables	p. 152
The length rule in Faroese	p. 152
The template for full syllables in Faroese	p. 155
Half length and overlength in Faroese	p. 156
Full syllables and restricted syllables in the phonological hierarchy	p. 157
The consonantal phonotactics of Icelandic	p. 160
Initial onsets in Icelandic	p. 161
Consonants in the Icelandic coda	p. 165
Internal onsets in Icelandic	p. 167
More complicated interludes in Icelandic	p. 170
The consonantal phonotactics of Faroese	p. 173
Monosegmental onsets	p. 173
Initial clusters in Faroese	p. 175
Faroese coda consonants	p. 176
Internal onsets in Faroese	p. 178
Gemination of glides and consonants	p. 180
Conclusion: remarks on systemic structure and prominence	p. 182
Length and Quantity in Accentuation and Phonotactics	p. 185
Length and quantity in Icelandic	p. 186
Some distinctions	p. 186
Segmental length and syllabic structure	p. 189
Length in postlexical accentuation	p. 191
Representing length and quantity	p. 195
Excursus: A brief comparison with Finland Swedish	p. 202
The length rule on lexical and phonological levels in Icelandic	p. 203
Length and syllabification	p. 203
Two versions of the rule	p. 205
The prosodic character of Faroese vowels	p. 208
Vowel shortness and the scale of prominence	p. 210
Segments and syllables on phonological levels
Aspiration in Syllabic and Segmental Structure	p. 215
Aspiration and the character of the fortis-lenis opposition	p. 216
Representing the opposition	p. 216
Phonotactic or phonetic neutralization of the fortis-lenis opposition?	p. 217
Preaspiration in Icelandic	p. 219
The phonetic character	p. 219
The distribution of preaspiration in Icelandic	p. 220
Phonological analysis	p. 222
Related phenomena	p. 225
Preaspiration in Faroese	p. 228
Representing the difference	p. 230
Preaspiration in morphophonemics	p. 231
Allomorphy, Morphophonemics, and Phonological Levels	p. 234
Introduction	p. 234
Lexical and postlexical relations in paradigms	p. 235
Vocalic patterns in Icelandic	p. 238
The ablaut series	p. 238
I-umlaut	p. 239
U-umlaut and breaking	p. 243
Morphology and phonotactics in vocalic alternation	p. 246
Faroese vowel morphophonemics	p. 247
Ablaut	p. 247
Umlaut	p. 248
Consonantal patterns in Icelandic morphophonemics	p. 250
Consonantal patterns in Faroese	p. 252
Vowel deletion in paradigms	p. 253
Intersyllabic glides and fricatives in allomorphy	p. 257
Morphosyntax and phonology	p. 259
Lexical and postlexical principles	p. 259
Clitics	p. 263
Fossilized and non-fossilized patterns in Faroese	p. 264
Conclusion	p. 265
Rhythmic structure
Word Stress Patterns in Icelandic and Faroese	p. 271
Icelandic word stress patterns	p. 271
Native patterns	p. 271
Foreign patterns in recent loans	p. 274
Word stress patterns in Faroese	p. 275
Native words	p. 275
Loanwords in Faroese	p. 278
The accommodation of foreign stress patterns	p. 279
Right-strong forms in Icelandic	p. 279
The Faroese patterns	p. 280
Morphological considerations: Faroese pseudo-morphology?	p. 282
Phrasing and Postlexical Phonology	p. 285
Phonological phrasing	p. 285
Systematic exceptions	p. 286
Deaccenting of weak morphosyntactic categories	p. 286
Deaccenting in Icelandic definite noun phrases	p. 289
Pragmatically motivated exceptions	p. 290
Emphatic rephrasing	p. 290
Contrast, focus, and given information	p. 291
The phonological consequences of phrasing	p. 292
Cohesive laws or sandhi-rules in Icelandic	p. 292
Sandhi in Faroese	p. 297
Rhythmic rearrangement	p. 300
Demarcative signals	p. 300
Stress and glottal onset	p. 301
Right hand signals in Icelandic	p. 302
Demarcative signals in Faroese	p. 302
Constituency and prominence	p. 303
Boundaries or dependencies?	p. 303
Domains, directionality, and prominence	p. 305
Rhythm and Intonation	p. 308
Rhythm and constituency	p. 308
Icelandic intonation	p. 313
The tonal inventory	p. 314
Downstep and upstep	p. 318
Functional considerations	p. 320
Faroese intonation	p. 324
The absence of word tones	p. 326
A note on phonetic data	p. 328
References	p. 329
Index	p. 343
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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