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Tomas Riad

About me

Tomas Riad, professor of Nordic languages

Department of Swedish language and multilingualism at Stockholm University, since 2005, member of the Swedish Academy since 2011.  

 

Ongoing projects

Intensivsvenska Samsyn (2022–2026)

Intensivsvenska Samsas (2021–2022)

This project is concerned with literarisation, that is basic reading and pronunciation in combination, training the coding and decoding of phonemes and graphemes. We word with teachers and new arrivals in two upper secondary schools.

Intensive education in Swedish for school-age new arrivals (2016–2020) 

Intensive education in Swedish for new arrivals is a three-year + 1 long development project aimed as school and teaching. The purpose is to support integration of new arrivals in secondary and upper secondary school. We develop a teaching model which will support the path for newly arrived pupils to advance in education and professional life. 

Bild från intensivsvenska.se
 intensivsvenska.se. Photo: Maria Lim Falk
 

Project management 

The project is managed by scholars at the Department of Swedish language and multilingualism, Stockholm University. The project leading group consists of Maria Lim Falk (project leader), Tomas Riad, Monica Karlsson, Helena Bani-Shoraka, Ann Boglind and Gustav Westberg.

Grant givers and organisation

The project has come about as a cooperation between the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation (main financier), the Swedish Academy (initiative, principal), Stockholm University (co-financier) and the Department of Swedish language and multilingualism, Stockholm University (co-financier).

The project is part of a larger educational program run by the Wallenberg foundations Utbildning för ökad integration, which includes also the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences​ (KVA) and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA).

2. Scanian and Danish intonation systems. The transition from North Germanic to West Germanic. (VR 2017–2019)

The project is led by Sara Myrberg, Lund University. We look at how the intonation of Swedish and Danish resemble each other, and at how they differ in order to better understand general similarities and differences between North and West Germanic languages. Scanian and Danish appear to form a transition area which should give us clues as to how the different intonation systems relate to one another.  
 

Research

My main research interests are phonology, prosody, verse metrics, historical linguistics and morphology.

Prosody and morphology

In Swedish, prosody plays an important role in morphological structure. Many morphemes are lexically specified for prosodic information. They may be stressed (tonic), or require to be next to a stressed syllable (posttonic, pretonic). These properties determine how morphemes can combine with each other, to some extent. I've written about this in the monograph Prosodin i svenskans morfologi (2015, Morfem förlag) and in the article Culminativity, stress and tone accent in Central Swedish (Lingua 2012). Prosodic morphology is also important in nickname formation, cf. Svensk smeknamnsfonologi (2002) and Smeknamnet är redan givet (Språktidningen 2016).

Prosody and verse metrics

Verse metrics is usually described in other terms than the prosodic ones, but there is much to gain from looking at meter from a prosodic, linguistic perspective. My general approach to meter is to try and reduce as much as possible to regular grammar. The fact that grammar (phonology) is involved is obvious already in the observation that the metrics used in a language always has to obey the phonology of the language. A recent contribution in this area is The phonology of Tashlhiyt Berber songs (NLLT 2016). Other works include The phonology of Greek meter (with Chris Golston, Linguistics 2005), Accents left and right (2009) and Sköna och osköna ljud i skönlitteraturen (2013).

Prosody and language history

I first started out in this are as a graduate student. My doctoral dissertation, Structures in Germanic prosody (1992), is a reconstruction of the stress system at various stages of the Germanic language history and the sound changes that are prosodically motivated.

After finishing my PhD, I started working on the tone accent distinction that is characteristic of Swedish and Norwegian. This work resulted in a number of articles concerning the origin of accents in North Germanic and their historical development: The origin of Scandinavian tone accents (Diachronica 1998), Historien om tonaccenten (2005), and also a couple of articles regarding the origin of Danish stød and how it relates to the tone accent systems: Origin of Danish stød 2000a, Stöten som aldrig blev av 2000b.

I have also worked on the typology of tone accent, that is, how the various dialects realize the tone accent distinction. The tone accents is the main feature used to divide Swedish and Norwegian into major dialect areas (Remarks on the Scandinavian accent typology 1998, Scandinavian accent typology, STUF 2006, The phonological typology of North Germanic accent, in press).

Phonology

I am the author of the monograph The phonology of Swedish (2014, Oxford University Press). In that book I go over the segmental and prosodic properties of the language. I've also written a couple of compendia for students on this subject: Svenskt fonologikompendium (1997) and Artikulatorisk fonetik och fonologi (2002, revised 2014).

Morphology

Within morphology proper, I have written the article Den dära och sånt därnt (2006) in the Festschrift for Staffan Hellberg (my advisor), and the compendium Ordbetydelser (2004). A book, Prosodin i svenskans morfologi (2015) combines phonology and morphology and concerns the formal side of morphology, which, I argue, is largely determined by prosody in Swedish.

epresentation of stress in the brain 

I have participated in a couple of brain studies based on my hypothesis (Allting ryms i varje frö, 1999) of a contrast between lexical stress (memorized) and phonologically assigned stress. These studies, both of which support the hypothesis, have Hatice Zora as main author: Lexical Specification of Prosodic Information in Swedish: Evidence from Mismatch Negativity (2016) and Prosodically controlled derivations in the mental lexicon (2019).

Research projects

Concurrent Collaboration

Reading development in newly arrived high school students addresses a well-defined educational need: the automatization of decoding in second language learner reading. Decoding is critical for comprehension and therefore for learning.

Research

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Grammatisk problemlösning, satsanalys och medvetandehöjande fonologi

    2022. Tomas Riad.

    Other

    Kompendiet har tre delar som anger tre huvudinriktningar. Den första delen handlar om satsanalys och frasanalys med stöd av scheman. Här lär du dig att systematiskt analysera svenskans meningsbyggnad med hjälp av satsschemat. Syntaktisk analys med satsschema är ett handfast sätt att koppla ihop vår språkliga intuition med konkret analys av satser och meningar. Schemat anger positioner för satsdelarna och positionernas ordning fungerar som stöd för analysen. När det uppstår frågor om olika satsdelar är det lätt att slå upp dem i de flesta grammatikböcker. Själva analyserandet och de olika test man kan använda för att identifiera satsdelars positioner har en medvetandehöjande effekt.

    Den andra delen innehåller medvetandehöjande övningar riktade mot fonologi. Vår fonologiska kunskap är ofta omedveten, särskilt vad gäller prosodi (betoning, stavelseindelning, kvantitet, tonaccent, intonation). Samtidigt är det inte svårt att göra denna kunskap medveten med hjälp av enkla övningar. Det är vad du ägnar dig åt i del två.

    Den tredje delen av kompendiet innehåller problemlösningsuppgifter. Genom att ägna dig åt grammatisk problemlösning blir du bra på att urskilja språkliga mönster. Grammatiken är till sin natur systematisk och det finns därför gott om mönster att upptäcka. Många av dem kan man läsa om i en grammatikbok men själva insikten om hur mönstren ser ut blir starkare och mer drabbande om man själv ådagalägger dem. Dessutom kan problemlösningsaktiviteten fungera som ett slag förberedelse för forskningsuppgifter. En annan poäng är att problemlösning gör det lättare att se vad som är regelbundet och vad som är oregelbundet i språket, vad som är generella mönster och vad som är mindre eller begränsade mönster.

    Read more about Grammatisk problemlösning, satsanalys och medvetandehöjande fonologi

  • Artikulatorisk fonetik och fonologi

    2020. Tomas Riad.

    Other

    Kompendiet riktar sig särskilt till studenter på grundnivå i nordiska språk och svenska. För den som vill läsa utförligare beskrivningar av fonetik hänvisas till de arbeten som tas upp i litteraturlistan. Ord markerade med kapitäler går att slå upp i termlistan sist i häftet.

    Tidigare versioner av detta kompendium är numera obsoleta

    Read more about Artikulatorisk fonetik och fonologi

  • The meter of Tashlhiyt Berber songs

    2016. Tomas Riad. Natural language and linguistic theory

    Article

    I present an analysis of Tashlhiyt Berber meter, based on the corpus of ‘straight’ meters collected and analyzed by Dell and Elmedlaoui (2008). There are 56 meters (35 independent, 21 dependent), which are systematically related to each other. Based on the many shared properties of all straight meters and their individual inflexibility, I suggest that they all derive from the same general metrical template, much in the same way as proposed by Deo (2007) for several Sanskrit meters. The individual meters are thus different realizations of the general meter, where the modulation of line length is part of the realizational variation (unlike the case in Sanskrit). I also argue that the generalizations pertaining to the system of meters can be better understood, and more broadly formulated, in terms of the phonology of the language, in three areas. First, the Tashlhiyt straight meters are rhythmic in a very specific sense: they all obey NO CLASH . Several previously unconnected facts—verse foot shapes, avoidance of two heavy syllables in sequence, and the regular alternation of verse feet—follow from this single fact. Second, the meters are pervasively binary, with a strong preference for tetrameter, a fact that is not predicted by models where line length is stipulated (e.g. Hanson and Kiparsky 1996; Fabb and Halle 2008). Line length tendencies follow from the linguistic constraints on binarity, under the assumption that metrical templates are derived from the prosodic hierarchy, rather than externally, e.g. from a specific meter-generating module (e.g. Kiparsky 1977; Blumenfeld 2015). This would indicate that meter is derived from grammar in just the same way as prosodic morphemes. Third, and related to the second point, the regular prosody and the meter are simultaneously present in a line of verse, a common assumption. However, the fact that both structures come out of the linguistic grammar means that grammar operates in both domains (like in root-and-pattern morphology), rather than there being a matching between them. Meter obeys some constraint to a higher degree than does regular prosody, instantiating overall improvement in the particular respect addressed by the chosen constraint. In the straight meters of Tashlhiyt Berber, this privileged constraint is NO CLASH  (as also in Tegnér’s Swedish hexameter), whereas in other systems the constraint may concern e.g. the alignment of prominence at some level (Darío’s Spanish alexandrines, Strindberg’s Swedish hexameter).

    Read more about The meter of Tashlhiyt Berber songs

  • The prosodic hierarchy of Swedish

    2015. Sara Myrberg, Tomas Riad. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 38 (2), 115-147

    Article

    We give an overview of the phonological properties and processes that define the categories of the prosodic hierarchy in Swedish: the PROSODIC WORD (omega), the PROSODIC PHRASE (phi) and the INTONATION PHRASE (iota). The separation of two types of tonal prominence, BIG ACCENTS versus SMALL ACCENTS (previously called FOCAL and WORD ACCENT, e.g. Bruce 1977, 2007), is crucial for our analysis. The omega in Swedish needs to be structured on two levels, which we refer to as the minimal omega and the maximal omega, respectively. The minimal omega contains one stress, whereas the maximal. contains one accent. We argue for a separate category phi that governs the distribution of big accents within clauses. The iota governs the distribution of clause-related edge phenomena like the INITIALITY ACCENT and right-edge boundary tones as well as the distribution of NUCLEAR BIG ACCENTS.

    Read more about The prosodic hierarchy of Swedish

  • Word accent and intonation in Baltic

    2014. Tomas Riad, José Ignacio Hualde. Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Speech Prosody, 668-672

    Conference

    We examine the realization of word accent contrasts in Standard Latvian and East Aukštaitian Lithuanian across intonational contexts. In our Latvian data the contrast is manifested as level vs. falling pitch in most contexts, in addition to a durational difference. In Aukštaitian Lithuanian, instead, differences in vowel quality and duration cue the lexical contrast in the nuclei that we examine. While Latvian retains a tonal contrast, in Aukštaitian Lithuanian it has been replaced with a combined segmental/quantitative contrast, where the so-called circumflex tone corresponds to relatively shorter duration and, in the case of diphthongs, centralized quality in the first half. We discuss the implications of these findings for further typological work.

    Read more about Word accent and intonation in Baltic

  • Prosodically controlled derivations in the mental lexicon

    2019. Hatice Zora, Tomas Riad, Sari Ylinen. Journal of Neurolinguistics 52

    Article

    Swedish morphemes are classified as prosodically specified or prosodically unspecified, depending on lexical or phonological stress, respectively. Here, we investigate the allomorphy of the suffix -(i)sk, which indicates the distinction between lexical and phonological stress; if attached to a lexically stressed morpheme, it takes a non-syllabic form (-sk), whereas if attached to a phonologically stressed morpheme, an epenthetic vowel is inserted (-isk). Using mismatch negativity (MMN), we explored the neural processing of this allomorphy across lexically stressed and phonologically stressed morphemes. In an oddball paradigm, participants were occasionally presented with congruent and incongruent derivations, created by the suffix -(i)sk, within the repetitive presentation of their monomorphemic stems. The results indicated that the congruent derivation of the lexically stressed stem elicited a larger MMN than the incongruent sequences of the same stem and the derivational suffix, whereas after the phonologically stressed stem a non-significant tendency towards an opposite pattern was observed. We argue that the significant MMN response to the congruent derivation in the lexical stress condition is in line with lexical MMN, indicating a holistic processing of the sequence of lexically stressed stem and derivational suffix. The enhanced MMN response to the incongruent derivation in the phonological stress condition, on the other hand, is suggested to reflect combinatorial processing of the sequence of phonologically stressed stem and derivational suffix. These findings bring a new aspect to the dual-system approach to neural processing of morphologically complex words, namely the specification of word stress.

    Read more about Prosodically controlled derivations in the mental lexicon

  • Lexical Specification of Prosodic Information in Swedish

    2016. Hatice Zora (et al.). Frontiers in Neuroscience 10

    Article

    Like that of many other Germanic languages, the stress system of Swedish has mainly undergone phonological analysis. Recently, however, researchers have begun to recognize the central role of morphology in these systems. Similar to the lexical specification of tonal accent, the Swedish stress system is claimed to be morphologically determined and morphemes are thus categorized as prosodically specified and prosodically unspecified. Prosodically specified morphemes bear stress information as part of their lexical representations and are classified as tonic (i.e., lexically stressed), pretonic and posttonic, whereas prosodically unspecified morphemes receive stress through a phonological rule that is right-edge oriented, but is sensitive to prosodic specification at that edge. The presence of prosodic specification is inferred from vowel quality and vowel quantity; if stress moves elsewhere, vowel quality and quantity change radically in phonologically stressed morphemes, whereas traces of stress remain in lexically stressed morphemes. The present study is the first to investigate whether stress is a lexical property of Swedish morphemes by comparing mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to vowel quality and quantity changes in phonologically stressed and lexically stressed words. In a passive oddball paradigm, 15 native speakers of Swedish were presented with standards and deviants, which differed from the standards in formant frequency and duration. Given that vowel quality and quantity changes are associated with morphological derivations only in phonologically stressed words, MMN responses are expected to be greater in phonologically stressed words than in lexically stressed words that lack such an association. The results indicated that the processing differences between phonologically and lexically stressed words were reflected in the amplitude and topography of MMN responses. Confirming the expectation, MMN amplitude was greater for the phonologically stressed word than for the lexically stressed word and showed a more widespread topographic distribution. The brain did not only detect vowel quality and quantity changes but also used them to activate memory traces associated with derivations. The present study therefore implies that morphology is directly involved in the Swedish stress system and that changes in phonological shape due to stress shift cue upcoming stress and potential addition of a morpheme.

    Read more about Lexical Specification of Prosodic Information in Swedish

  • Ordförråd och skolspråk

    2020. Maria Lim Falk (et al.).

    Report

    Ordförrådets storlek har ett starkt samband med läsförmåga och framgång i skolan. Projektet har därför satsat särskilt på att strukturera och systematisera elevernas möjligheter att tillägna sig ett relevant ordförråd relaterat till skolans alla ämnen. Dokumentet Ordförråd och skolspråk beskriver utgångspunkterna och ger exempel på planering och metoder för ordarbetet. Där rapporteras också en utvärdering av hur elever och lärare upplever satsningen.

    Read more about Ordförråd och skolspråk

  • The Sequence Recall Task and Lexicality of Tone: Exploring Tone “Deafness”

    2022. Carlos Gussenhoven (et al.). Frontiers in Psychology 13

    Article

    Many perception and processing effects of the lexical status of tone have been found in behavioral, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific research, often pitting varieties of tonal Chinese against non-tonal Germanic languages. While the linguistic and cognitive evidence for lexical tone is therefore beyond dispute, the word prosodic systems of many languages continue to escape the categorizations of typologists. One controversy concerns the existence of a typological class of “pitch accent languages,” another the underlying phonological nature of surface tone contrasts, which in some cases have been claimed to be metrical rather than tonal. We address the question whether the Sequence Recall Task (SRT), which has been shown to discriminate between languages with and without word stress, can distinguish languages with and without lexical tone. Using participants from non-tonal Indonesian, semi-tonal Swedish, and two varieties of tonal Mandarin, we ran SRTs with monosyllabic tonal contrasts to test the hypothesis that high performance in a tonal SRT indicates the lexical status of tone. An additional question concerned the extent to which accuracy scores depended on phonological and phonetic properties of a language’s tone system, like its complexity, the existence of an experimental contrast in a language’s phonology, and the phonetic salience of a contrast. The results suggest that a tonal SRT is not likely to discriminate between tonal and non-tonal languages within a typologically varied group, because of the effects of specific properties of their tone systems. Future research should therefore address the first hypothesis with participants from otherwise similar tonal and non-tonal varieties of the same language, where results from a tonal SRT may make a useful contribution to the typological debate on word prosody.

    Read more about The Sequence Recall Task and Lexicality of Tone

  • Att utveckla receptiva färdigheter

    2021. Tomas Riad.

    Other

    Hur man uppfattar, läser och förstår språk kallas reception och står i kontrast till produktion, som handlar om att tala och skriva. Receptionen uppfattas numera som en mycket aktiv process när man lär sig språk och den innehåller flera moment som vi ska uppmärksamma i denna inledande text. Texten syftar till att ge en bakgrund till de följande modultexterna, och till att särskilt lyfta fram några centrala faktorer som har generell betydelse både för receptionen av språk, och för utvecklandet av receptiva färdigheter hos elever i skolåldern.

    Efter en inledande beskrivning av de olika steg man kan urskilja i receptionen, diskuteras vikten dels av att placera ett första ordförråd i långtidsminnet, dels av att sträva mot automatisering av avkodningsförmågan. Vi återkommer sedan till dessa centrala frågor från ett par olika synvinklar under rubriken fonologisk medvetenhet. På vägen ges en del resultat från forskning och några metodiska tips för ordinlärning och avkodningsträning.

    Read more about Att utveckla receptiva färdigheter

  • Phonological Variations Are Compensated at the Lexical Level: Evidence From Auditory Neural Activity

    2021. Hatice Zora (et al.). Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 15

    Article

    Dealing with phonological variations is important for speech processing. This article addresses whether phonological variations introduced by assimilatory processes are compensated for at the pre-lexical or lexical level, and whether the nature of variation and the phonological context influence this process. To this end, Swedish nasal regressive place assimilation was investigated using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component. In nasal regressive assimilation, the coronal nasal assimilates to the place of articulation of a following segment, most clearly with a velar or labial place of articulation, as in utan mej “without me” > [ʉːtam mɛjː]. In a passive auditory oddball paradigm, 15 Swedish speakers were presented with Swedish phrases with attested and unattested phonological variations and contexts for nasal assimilation. Attested variations – a coronal-to-labial change as in utan “without” > [ʉːtam] – were contrasted with unattested variations – a labial-to-coronal change as in utom “except” > ∗[ʉːtɔn] – in appropriate and inappropriate contexts created by mej “me” [mɛjː] and dej “you” [dɛjː]. Given that the MMN amplitude depends on the degree of variation between two stimuli, the MMN responses were expected to indicate to what extent the distance between variants was tolerated by the perceptual system. Since the MMN response reflects not only low-level acoustic processing but also higher-level linguistic processes, the results were predicted to indicate whether listeners process assimilation at the pre-lexical and lexical levels. The results indicated no significant interactions across variations, suggesting that variations in phonological forms do not incur any cost in lexical retrieval; hence such variation is compensated for at the lexical level. However, since the MMN response reached significance only for a labial-to-coronal change in a labial context and for a coronal-to-labial change in a coronal context, the compensation might have been influenced by the nature of variation and the phonological context. It is therefore concluded that while assimilation is compensated for at the lexical level, there is also some influence from pre-lexical processing. The present results reveal not only signal-based perception of phonological units, but also higher-level lexical processing, and are thus able to reconcile the bottom-up and top-down models of speech processing.

    Read more about Phonological Variations Are Compensated at the Lexical Level

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