Chapter 1 Word Accent Harry van der Hulst

Do All Languages Have Word Accent?

1 This paper, which will appear in Harry van der Hulst, Studies on Word Accent, is a second revision (April 2012) of an oral paper presented at the Conference on Word Accent: Theoretical and Typological Issues, University of Connecticut, April 30, 2010. I would like to thank Harry van der Hulst, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the earlier drafts. 2 Harry van der Hulst ...

1 The study of word accent and stress : past , present , and future

11 Brackets and Grid Marks , or Theories of Primary Accent andRhythm

In this chapter, I present the outlines of a formal theory of word accent.1 The theory is nonmetrical in that the account of primary accent location is not based on iterative foot structure. The theory separates the representations of primary and rhythmic accents, the idea being that the latter are accounted for ‘‘with reference to’’ the primary accent location. This means that rhythmic structu...

Representing Accent

In this article I present a formal theory of word accent. The theory separates the representation of primary accent and ‘perceptually strong’ syllables that are due to rhythm (sometimes in combination with syllable weight), the idea being that the rhythmic beats are accounted for independently, although ‘with reference to’ the primary accent location.

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...