Stress and accent

In this article, I will discuss the phenomenon of (linguistic) stress as it applies to words. Units that are larger than words (such as phrases and sentences) can be said to have stress too, but I will not touch on these larger units here. Right away, in section 2, I propose to shift our attention to the notion of accent, which I define as more fundamental than stress. Stress, as we will see, can be seen as a phonetic manifestation of accent. I will provide a typology of the various ways in which accent is manifested besides through stress. In section 3, the question as to how accent is formally represented will be in focus. Section 4 argues that the set of accent-driven phenomena may be a reflection of lexical and postlexical accentual structures that can sometimes be in conflict with each other. In section 5, I briefly discuss the relationship between accentuation and morphology, and ‘stress shift’ rules.