ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2, I showed that Belgrade and Zagreb dialects are prosodically different: Belgrade has a lexical pitch contrast while Zagreb does not; Zagreb has pragmatically defined pitch accents. In addition, Belgrade has a vowel length contrast. In Zagreb (at least in the more formal style analyzed here), this contrast appears to be present in the speech of some speakers, but in a marginal manner, becoming robust only under narrow focus. For Zagreb speakerZl, the lexical vowel length contrast is completely absent as was reported for the "basilectal" Zagreb Kajkavian (Magner, 1966). Furthermore, pitch peak alignment ("early" vs. "late") crucially distinguishes lexical information in Belgrade (rising vs. falling accents). In addition, peak alignment changes in narrow focus in a restricted way (i.e., there are asymmetrical patterns of retraction and protraction between rising and falling accents which enlarge the contrast). For Zagreb, same type of peak alignment ("early" vs. "late") crucially distinguishes between broad and narrow focus (i.e., it conveys pragmatic rather than lexical information). It has also been established in previous analyses that lengthening is utilized by both dialects in the expression of narrow focus. Asymmetric patterns of lengthening exist when there is a lexical length contrast between short and long vowels. Short vowels lengthen less while long vowels lengthen more. For speakers without the lexical vowel length contrast, vowels are uniformly lengthened to enhance prominence in a prosodically strong position (i.e., in narrow focus). The asymmetric patterns of acoustic cue manipulation (both peak alignment and vowel length) serve to enlarge the existing lexical contrasts.
