Prosodical System of the Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys of the Lithuanian Language

Abstract

The Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys of the Lithuanian Language is interesting in synchronic, diachronic, typological, and ethnogenetic aspects; its idioms bear some witness to contacts of Lithuanian and Semigalian languages (Kačiuškienė 2009). The secondary types of pitch accents of the Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys were discussed in Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 24 (Kačiuškienė 2016). The auditory and instrumental research proved that two secondary types of pitch accents contrast in the pure and mixed diphthongs of the forms of some dialectal verbs and denominative words in the Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys of the Lithuanian Language. This is a distinctive opposition. It is possible that the opposition relates to Proto-Baltic accentuation paradigms. The secondary types of pitch accents have different acoustic properties. The most distinct are the quantitative characteristics of diphthongs and characteristics of the fundamental pitch. The detailed analysis of the prosodic system of the Northern Panevėžys dialect in the present article is based on the data of the author’s native dialect and the instrumental and auditory research (see (Kačiuškienė 2006)). The results of the research of the Northern Aukštaitian dialect of Panevėžys are important to the comparative and historical dialectology of the Baltic languages; they can be used in typological research and in the classroom as teaching materials.