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Word-prosodic typology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2006

Larry M. Hyman
Larry M. Hyman
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
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Abstract

Numerous proposals have been advanced as to how prosodic systems should be typologised. In this paper I distinguish two prototype systems, tone and stress accent, which, unlike systems analysed as ‘pitch accent’, have two inviolable, definitional properties: (i) obligatoriness (every word has at least one stress accent); (ii) syllable-dependency (the stress-bearing unit is necessarily the syllable). In contrast, the oft-cited criterion of culminativity (every word has at most one tone/accent) not only includes tone/accent systems that are neither obligatory nor syllable-dependent, but also culminative non-prosodic features that are clearly not accentual. I argue that there is no one pitch-accent prototype. Instead, since tone and stress accent may co-occur, and since languages may ‘pick and choose’ between the non-definitional properties that tend to cluster within the tone vs. stress-accent prototypes, there is a range of intermediate (and possibly indeterminate) word-prosodic systems which may or may not be best seen as ‘types’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Phonology , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , August 2006 , pp. 225 - 257
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This paper was first presented as an invited talk at the conference Between Stress and Tone (BeST). I would like to thank Bert Remijsen and Vincent van Heuven for the invitation and those in attendance for their helpful comments. I have particularly profited from extended discussions with Carlos Gussenhoven and José Hualde on the tone vs. accent question and good Bantu exchanges with David Odden and Gérard Philippson. I also would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their very thoughtful comments on the original manuscript.