On the accented/unaccented distinction in Western Basque and the typology of accentual systems

1. Introduction Beckman (1986) draws a distinction between stress-accent and non-stress-accent (i.e., pitch-accent) languages. Stress-accent languages, such as English, convey accentual prominence by a combination of phonetic cues, including pitch, intensity and duration. Non-stress-accent languages, on the other hand, use only pitch as a correlate of accent. Tokyo Japanese is an example of the latter group. Since in Japanese duration plays a very important role in establishing phonological contrasts (both between short and long vowels and between single and geminate consonants), a question that naturally arises is whether the phonological role of duration is responsible for the fact that this feature is not used as a correlate of accent in this language. It appears to us that the validity of Beckman's typology can be tested with a language like Northern Bizkaian (NB) Basque which shares some important features with Tokyo Japanese but which crucially lacks durational contrasts in its phonology. A first feature that NB Basque dialects have in common with Tokyo Japanese is a lexical distinction between accented and unaccented words with most words belonging to the unaccented class (Hualde 1991, 1999). In addition, in both languages lexically accented words always surface with a H*+L pitch-accent on a given syllable (in NB Basque, lexically unnaccented words do not bear any pitch-accent, unless they are in final place in the preverbal focus position, on in isolation, in which case they are also associated with a H*+L contour). A third common feature is that accentual phrases are marked out by an initial rising boundary %LH-, with the high target loosely associated with the second syllable. NB Basque, on the other hand, crucially differs from Japanese, as mentioned, in not making any phonological contrasts of length. In other words, there are no long vowels or geminate consonants. Since duration is not employed in a lexically contrastive manner, Basque allows us to test whether this feature could be used as a correlate of accent in prosodic systems of the Tokyo Japanese type. Two hypotheses are entertained: Hypothesis A: Stress-accent and pitch-accent are fundamentally different phenomena. Pitch-accent languages employ only contrasts in pitch, regardless of