Tonal accents in Norwegian: Phonology, morphology and lexical specification breaks from the traditional and contemporary analyses of word accent in North Germanic with the goal of providing a more simplex and unified morphophonological analysis of word accents in North Germanic. It gives the facts of accent distribution in Standard East Norwegian, discusses how three of the more recent and most important analyses of accent assignment in Norwegian and Swedish deal with these facts and provides an alternative analysis. Given that many Accent 1 words are loans, the book also discusses how loanword incorporated in East Norwegian and other North Germanic dialects and the question of why loans predominantly bear Accent 1.
Although the focus of the book is word accent assignment in Standard East Norwegian, it also refers to Central Swedish and Old Norse. In this way, it accounts for many aspects of accent assignment, the true nature of which might have gone undetected had only one of the North Germanic language been taken into consideration.
The book also dedicates one chapter to the phonetics of the tonal contrast. Addressing the question of how perceptually salient the tonal contrast is.