![]() ![]() Larry Hyman argues that tone is made up of a variety of different typological features, which can be mixed and matched with some independence from each other. Since raised pitch, especially when it coincides with vowel length, makes a syllable perceptually more prominent, it can often require detailed phonetic and phonological analysis to disentangle whether pitch is playing a more stress-like or a more tone-like role in a particular language" (Downing). "It is, in fact, often not straightforward to decide whether a particular pitch system is best described as tonal or accentual. Often, however, the difference between a pitch-accent language, a stress-accent language, and tonal language is not clear. One feature shared between pitch-accent languages and stress-accent languages is demarcativeness: prominence peaks tend to occur at or near morpheme edges (word/stem initial, word/stem penult, word/stem final). But there are also some pitch-accent languages in which every word has an accent. This is not always true of pitch-accent languages, some of which, like Japanese and Northern Bizkaian Basque, have accentless words. Ī feature considered characteristic of stress-accent languages is that a stress-accent is obligatory, that is, that every major word has to have an accent. However, other scholars disagree, and find that intensity and duration can also play a part in the accent of pitch-accent languages. Īccording to another proposal, pitch-accent languages can only use F0 (i.e., pitch) to mark the accented syllable, whereas stress languages may also use duration and intensity (Beckman). Although this is true of many pitch-accent languages, there are others, such as the Franconian dialects, in which the contours vary, for example between declarative and interrogative sentences. This is not so for pure stress languages, where the tonal contours of stressed syllables can vary freely" (Hayes (1995)). Īnother property suggested for pitch-accent languages to distinguish them from stress languages is that "Pitch accent languages must satisfy the criterion of having invariant tonal contours on accented syllables. This feature of having only one prominent syllable in a word or morpheme is known as culminativity. That is to say, in a pitch-accent language, in order to indicate how a word is pronounced it is necessary, as with a stress-accent language, to mark only one syllable in a word as accented, not specify the tone of every syllable. A typical definition is as follows: "Pitch-accent systems systems in which one syllable is more prominent than the other syllables in the same word, a prominence that is achieved by means of pitch" (Zanten and Dol (2010)). Scholars give various definitions of a pitch-accent language. Characteristics of pitch-accent languages Definitions The term "pitch accent" is also used to denote a different feature, namely the use of pitch when speaking to give selective prominence (accent) to a syllable or mora within a phrase. Some of the languages considered pitch-accent languages, in addition to accented words, also have accentless words (e.g., Japanese and Western Basque) in others all major words are accented (e.g., Blackfoot and Barasana). In this latter kind, the accented syllable is also often stressed another way. Pitch-accent languages tend to fall into two categories: those with a single pitch-contour (for example, high, or high–low) on the accented syllable, such as Tokyo Japanese, Western Basque, or Persian and those in which more than one pitch-contour can occur on the accented syllable, such as Punjabi, Swedish, or Serbo-Croatian. Languages that have been described as pitch-accent languages include: most dialects of Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Baltic languages, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Tlingit, Turkish, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish (but not in Finland), Western Basque, Yaqui, certain dialects of Korean, Shanghainese, and Livonian. Some scholars have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general. Pitch-accent also contrasts with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese, Thai and Standard Chinese, in which practically every syllable can have an independent tone. For the distinction between, / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.Ī pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness or length, as in some other languages like English. ![]() For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). ![]()
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