Tonal and stress accents

[Max Wheeler]

-- Begin original message --

> From: "jose.perez3" <jose.perez3 at yucom.be>

> I'd be very thankful for anybody who has paid attention to the issue of tonal
> and stress accent to elaborate on this subject, presenting some sound
> information about how we think that IE differed from most modern European
> languages in its accent.

> Is there still anybody around there who thinks that most modern languages
> have "stress accents"? Has anybody checked on this with expert phoneticians?

> When I studied Classics, my teachers explained to me that Classical Latin had
> stress accents but that they named them with "musical" terms because they
> were "copying" Greek grammarians.

> The problem is that to my (admittedly poorly trained) ears Modern Greek has a
> tonal accent, so I don't see what has changed about that ever since Homer.
> All Romance languages have tonal accents (pronounce any of them taking away
> any stress from the accented sylables and the change of tone will still
> indicate where it goes)... so how was Latin different from them?? The same
> applies to modern Germanic and Slavic languages. In fact I'm still waiting to
> come across the proverbial language with pitched non tonal accent to begin to
> fathom what the whole story is about.

> Or am I still missing the obvious?

>                     Joe

-- End original message --

Possibly the last ;-)

The thing about a stress accent is not that it is not realized by pitch/tone
change (possibly in combination with other features such as length and
loudness), but that it doesn't matter at all what the direction or level of the
pitch is. Or, to put it another way, pitch DIRECTION (contour) or pitch LEVEL
is not lexically contrastive. In languages like English, in CITATION forms,
lexical stress is realized by falling tone. But the same lexeme may well have
rising, level, fall-rise tone, whose starting point may be high or low, in a
particular utterance context. The shape of the pitch contour is determined at
the phrase, sentence, or possibly discourse level. All that is determined
lexically is which syllable bears 'accent'. In this respect Classical Latin,
Modern Greek and English are alike, along with most other European languages.
Ancient Greek is described as pitch-accented because there was a possible
contrast on long vowels between 'acute' (realized as 'grave'in some contexts,
an element of 'tone sandhi') and 'circumflex'. But even here, in an alternative
moraic analysis, there would be only one 'accent' which might fall on the first
or the second mora of a long vowel, to give circumflex and acute respectively.

This is aimed at your general linguistic query. It's not clear to me what
accent system is plausible for late PIE, though I guess some IE alternations,
such as full-grade/zero-grade alternations and Verner's law only make sense in
stress systems. I don't think it's easy to make sense of e/o alternations via
either stress or pitch (which is not to say it's impossible).

Max Wheeler

______________________________________________________________
Max W. Wheeler
School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
BRIGHTON BN1 9QH, G.B.

Tel: +44 (0)1273 678975 Fax: +44 (0)1273 671320 Email: maxw at cogs.susx.ac.uk
______________________________________________________________