A TREATISE ON THE DANISH 'STOD' (PHONOLOGY, SOCIOLINGUISTICS)

This is a study of the Danish glottal catch or stod from four principal points of view: (1) It is an attempt at writing a generative analysis of stod in modern Standard Danish. (2) The history of stod within the Standard is examined. (3) Three different dialects of Danish that exhibit differences with regard to stod are examined. (4) A dialect which historically did not have stod was studied in the field to establish whether stod, as a result of social developments, is making inroads into the dialect.; Chapter I introduces the theoretical concepts utilized and examines the phonetic facts of stod.; Chapter II traces the history of scholarship of stod in the twentieth century, concentrating on structuralist and transformational-generative analyses.; Chapter III presents the author's own theory of stod based solely on surface occurrences in the language. The theory further holds stod is in the midst of an historical expansion. The analysis suggested incorporates this. A hierarchical tree-model for the Danish syllable and a set of resyllabifiction rules are suggested.; Chapter IV examines the history of stod in the Standard as it emerges from grammars of Danish dating back to the eighteenth century. The Danish linguist J. P. Hoysgaard is used as a data source to establish the distribution of stod in the early seventeen hundreds.; Chapter V deals with three Danish dialects which present different stod-distributions, and in one case tones in lieu of stod, from the Standard. The dialects examined are Sjdellandish, West-Jyllandish and the Sundeved dialect of south-eastern Jylland.; Chapter VI examines changes taking place in a Danish dialect. Traditionally the dialects on the island of Aero have had tones like the ones of Swedish and Norwegian rather than stod. Young informants who have grown up in the wake of the concentrated industrialization Denmark has seen since the early fifties showed a strong tendency to speak a more standardized language than the people born in or before the nineteen thirties. Stod was found to be common in reading styles of teen-agers and occasionally occurred in the casual speech of informants of this age group. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)...