Although Einar Haugen in his 1967 article ‘On the rules of Norwegian tonality’ stated that “compounds are the most difficult part of the morphology”, it is precisely the distribution of word accent in compounds that provides us with insight into the morphophonological interactions of the language.
In this article, we analyze compounds made up of all possible element and accent combinations, and show that by assuming a privative accent opposition for North Germanic languages where Accent 1 is lexically specified and Accent 2 the default and following a proposed lexical phonology for Standard East Norwegian, we can easily account for all the facts.
The full paper has been published in The Linguistic Review, and can be found here
