© 2001 S. Karger AG, Basel 0031–8388/01/0584–0230 Fax + 41 61 306 12 34 $17.50/0 E-Mail karger@karger.ch Accessible online at: www.karger.com www.karger.com/journals/pho Original Paper Phonetica 2001;58:230–253 Nina Grønnum Department of General and Applied Linguistics University of Copenhagen, Njalsgade 80 DK–2300 Copenhagen (Denmark) Tel. +45 35 32 86 63, Fax +45 35 32 86 35 E-Mail ng@cphling.dk Consonant Length, Stød and Morae in Standard Danish Nina Grønnum a Hans Basbøll b a Department of General and Applied Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, b Institute of Language and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense University, Odense, Denmark Abstract After a brief summary of Hans Basbøll's mora analysis of Danish stød, the results of an acoustic analysis of – primarily – consonant duration are reported. In natural running speech postvocalic stød bearing (moraic) sonorant consonants are not – as might be expected from previous investigations – systematically longer across posi- tions than the corresponding stødless (non-moraic) consonants; therefore, in modern standard Copenhagen Danish, the moraic/non-moraic distinction in consonants is qualitative, not straightforwardly quantitative, as it is in vowels. Further, the results of an analysis of consonant duration in schwa assimilation are reported. The impor- tance of citation form speech material versus more natural running speech is dis- cussed. Copyright © 2001 S. Karger AG, Basel 1. Introduction This is an essay in laboratory phonology: we attempt to test the phonetic reality of a proposal that consonants with stød are phonologically long. Stød is a kind of creaky voice, a laryngealization which characterizes certain syllable rhymes under certain conditions. Its phonetic properties have been treated in depth by Fischer-Jørgensen [1987, 1989a, b], its phonology and inflectional morphology by Basbøll [1985, 1988, 1998a]. Hansen [1943] is the pioneer treatment of its grammatical aspects. Laryngeal- ization (or glottalization) exists in a number of other languages, but nowhere in our part of the world does it have a similar function and distribution [see also Kohler, 2001]. Traditionally, potential for stød was a question of phonetic ‘stødbasis’. A stressed syllable with a long vowel, or with a short vowel succeeded by a sonorant consonant has stødbasis. In monomorphemic words the occurrence of stød can be charted thus (for ease of reading, English translations of the examples are relegated to the ‘Appen- dix’): Received: July 28, 2000 Accepted: February 12, 2001