Pitch Accent Systems

This chapter deals with the typology of word prosodic systems and, specifically, discusses the notion ‘pitch-accent (language)’, asking whether there is such a class of languages as distinct from the notions ‘stress (language)’ and ‘tone (language)’. Several issues will turn out to be crucial. Firstly, there is the issue of recognizing (or not) a notion of accent which could be said to underlie both pitch-accent and ‘stress’ (or indeed stressaccent), and perhaps even other phenomena which are often not even referred to as accentual (such as phonotactic asymmetries). Secondly, there is the question as to whether we wish to distinguish between pitch as a non-distinctive and thus perhaps strictly phonetic property (arising in phonetic implementation) and pitch as the exponent of a phonological category (namely tone). Thirdly, there is the possibility of having tone, stress and accent (in various combinations) ‘side by side’ within the same language which raises the question how these notions interact in any given language. The structure of this chapter is as follows: In section 2 I will introduce the basic notions and definitions. Section 3 will briefly mention examples of languages that have been referred to as pitch accent languages, where accent is apparently realized in terms of non-distinctive pitch. In section 4, we then examine cases in which tone realization or tone distribution has been said to depend on accent (or stress), a class of languages that is also often included in the pitch-accent type. Section 5 and 6 focus on the different ways in which alleged pitch accent languages have been analyzed, with or without using the notion ‘accent’. In section 7, I define the notions accent and stress as distinct phonological entities and suggest that stress languages may or may not be accentual. In section 8 I offer some conclusions.