Blackwell Reference Online

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In the linguistic expressions of many languages, words vary in prominence. In the English compound (1a), there is some sense in which tax has more prominence than relief , and in the sentence (1b) the same can be said about the subject NP My bike as compared to the verbal phrase has been stolen . Example (1c) illustrates how the perception of prominence can be more differentiated than this: English appears to be more prominent than teacher , which in turn may seem more prominent than Old . The above observations touch on two aspects of the phonological structure of English which have been the topic of intense debate over the past decades. The first concerns the phonological nature of this prominence: how is it represented in the structure? There have been widely different answers to this question. The main division is between views that see prominence as a single dimension and views that separate word stress from intonational pitch accents. A number of representations that fall in the first class of views are discussed in §2. §3 introduces the second class and explains the difference between word stress and accentuation. §4 then returns to some of the examples discussed in §2, offering an account for them first by assuming that the sentence prominences are pitch accents, and second by identifying the accent assignment or deletion rules that are held responsible for ... log in or subscribe to read full text