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A 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.
Pitch accent is a term used in autosegmental-metrical theory for local intonational features that are associated with particular syllables. Within this framework, pitch accents are distinguished from both the abstract metrical stress and the acoustic stress of a syllable. Different languages specify different relationships between pitch accent ...
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. [1] All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic information and to convey emphasis, contrast and other such features in what is called intonation, but not all languages use tones to distinguish words or their inflections, analogously ...
In some contexts, the term stress or stress accent specifically means dynamic accent (or as an antonym to pitch accent in its various meanings). A prominent syllable or word is said to be accented or tonic; the latter term does not imply that it carries phonemic tone. Other syllables or words are said to be unaccented or atonic.
Only two tones, associated with pitch accents, are recognised, these being H (high) and L (low); all other tonal contours are made up of combinations of H, L and some other modifying elements. In addition to the two tones mentioned above, the phonological system includes "break indices" used to mark the boundaries between prosodic elements.
Here the asterisk (*) indicates a pitch accent, the hyphen (−) indicates a phrase accent, which fills the interval between the last pitch accent and the final boundary tone, and the percent symbol (%) indicates the boundary tone itself. [5] Pitch track illustrating the H% boundary tone, from Pierrehumbert (1980), p. 266.
Languages use these properties to different degrees to implement stress, pitch accents, and intonation — for example, stress in English and Spanish is correlated with changes in pitch and duration, whereas stress in Welsh is more consistently correlated with pitch than duration and stress in Thai is only correlated with duration. [108]
Ancient Greek pitch accent is placed on only one mora in a word. An acute (έ, ή) represents high pitch on the only mora of a short vowel or the last mora of a long vowel (é, eé). A circumflex (ῆ) represents high pitch on the first mora of a long vowel (ée).