Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This chapter deals with the typology of word prosodic systems and, specifically, discusses the notion of “pitch accent (language),” asking whether there is such a class of pitch accent languages distinct from “stress languages” and “tone languages.” 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 both pitch accent and “stress” (or indeed stress accent), and perhaps other phenomena which are not frequently referred to as accentual (such as phonotactic asymmetries). Secondly, there is the question as to whether we wish to distinguish between pitch as a non-distinctive and thus perhaps strictly phonetic property (found in phonetic implementation) and pitch as the exponent of a phonological category (namely tone ). Thirdly, there is the possibility of having tone, stress, and accent (in various combinations) “side by side” within the same language, which raises the question of how these notions interact in any given language. The structure of this chapter is as follows. In §2 I will introduce the basic notions and definitions. §3 will briefly discuss examples of languages that have been referred to as pitch accent languages, where accent is apparently realized in terms of non-distinctive pitch. In §4, I examine cases in which tone realization or tone distribution has been said ... log in or subscribe to read full text