The Interaction of Animacy with Phonetic and Phonological Factors in Neostokavian Pitch Accents

The Neoštokavian dialect of Croatian belongs to the somewhat obscure category of pitch accent languages,1 making use of both tone and another type of prominence, usually termed stress, in wordlevel prosody (Babić, 1988; van der Hulst & Smith, 1988; Bethin, 1994; Inkelas & Zec, 1988; Zec, 1992, 1999). The interaction between tone and stress yields four accents, traditionally called long falling (“a), short falling (‚a), long rising (á) and short rising (à). If tone and stress are distinguished as properties that are partially independent in their realization, meaning that they can but do not have to be realized on the same syllable, falling accents can be described as High tone on the stressed syllable, as in (1a) and (1b) (since the tone falls following the ’stressed’ syllable), and rising accents as High tone on the post-stressed syllable, as in (1c) and (1d) (since the tone rises following the ’stressed’ syllable). The stressed vowel can be either short or long.