33.2007, Review: Phonetics; Phonology: Goedemans, Heinz, van der Hulst (2021)
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Subject: 33.2007, Review: Phonetics; Phonology: Goedemans, Heinz, van der Hulst (2021)
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Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2022 23:04:58
From: Asmaa Shehata [asm.shehata at gmail.com]
Subject: The Study of Word Stress and Accent
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36739397
Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-1379.html
EDITOR: Rob Goedemans
EDITOR: Jeffrey Heinz
EDITOR: Harry van der Hulst
TITLE: The Study of Word Stress and Accent
SUBTITLE: Theories, Methods and Data
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2021
REVIEWER: Asmaa Shehata, University of Mississippi
SUMMARY
“The Study of Word Stress and Accent” is a collaborative volume compiled by
Rob Goedemans, Jeffrey Heinz, and Harry van der Hulst that investigates a
number of significant topics related to stress systems of the world’s
languages. The purpose of this book is threefold: (1) to enhance, validate,
and develop datasets related to word stress and accent, (2) to create a
database of word stress systems and make it available to researchers around
the world, and (3) to adopt best practices to collect and organize data on
stress patterns. In addition to the introduction, the book includes 13
chapters grouped into three main themes: phonetic correlates and prominence
distinctions, typology, and case studies.
In the introductory chapter, the three editors provide background information
about the volume and how the chapters were collected. According to them, the
volume is based on presentations at a three-day conference organized at Leiden
University in 2016. While some chapters were written by some speakers whose
abstracts were accepted, other chapters were written by invited speakers. The
chapter displays an overview of the central themes in the volume’s three main
parts and provides a brief outline of each chapter. The authors conclude the
chapter by emphasizing the originality of the empirical studies presented in
the book.
Part 1, Phonetic Correlates and Prominence Distinctions, includes four
chapters. Chapter 1, “Acoustic Correlates and Perceptual Cues of Word and
Sentence Stress: Towards a Cross-Linguistic Perspective”, by Vincent J. van
Heuven, aims to present the possible ways for phonetically marking word and
sentence stress. The chapter starts off with a very brief description of the
difference between stress and tone languages. Then it moves on to introduce
the acoustic correlates of stress, clarifying some methodological
considerations, main properties of word as well as sentence stress, and the
relative strength of stress correlates. The chapter concludes by
distinguishing between the acoustic cues of stress used by some computer
algorithms and those used by human listeners. In this regard, the author
demonstrates that syllable intensity allows for the separation of stressed
syllables from unstressed syllables, something which is rarely used by human
listeners.
In a similar vein, Chapter 2, “Positional Prominence Versus Word Accent: Is
There a Difference?”, by Larry Hyman, explores the effects of positional
prominence in a few African tonal languages in an attempt to define them in
terms of the notion of word accent. In this respect, the author presents case
studies with three different African tone languages: Ibibio, Punu, and
Lulamogi. Findings indicate that Ibibio exhibits a privilege for the
stem-initial position, but the other two languages utilize both stem-initial
and word-penultimate stress. As such, the chapter concludes by emphasizing
that it is more essential to focus on the primary features of prominent
positions than on what we call them.
Chapter 3, “Explaining Word-Final Stress Type”, by Anya Lunden, examines the
relationship between the phonetic realization of stress and the word-edge
phonetic effects on final syllables. To this end, Lunden has made a database
of stress correlates and reported two important findings. First, evidence is
reported for a correlation between languages’ tolerance of final stress lapse
and their use of the duration of stress. This emphasizes that if there is an
increase in duration in stressed syllables, the final syllable is expected to
be perplexing. Second, the results provide no evidence for the correlation
between final lapse and stress correlates of pitch or intensity.
Chapter 4, “What Danish and Estonian Can Show to a Modern Word-Prosodic
Typology”, by Natalia Kuznetsova, discusses two-word prosodic units with a
non-pitch-based primary phonetic exponent: prosodic quantity in Standard
Estonian and prosodic laryngealization in Copenhagen Danish. The chapter
starts with a description of their phonetic and functional features. The
prosody of the two languages is discussed phonetically and phonologically.
While the phonetic aspects include both perception and production, the
phonological aspects are described with respect to pitch and stress in the two
languages. Then, the chosen word prosodic units are compared to pitch-based
word prosody in other languages within a special theoretical framework that
the author calls the mainstream word-prosodic typology framework. In addition,
features of both Danish word prosody and Estonian word prosody are introduced.
The chapter concludes with a proposal regarding the word prosodic typology
that mainly separates the variables of location and the ways in which the
location is realized.
Building upon the above theoretical perspectives, Part 2 “Typology” presents
fascinating discussions of many typological issues. More specifically, it
addresses issues related to foot typology, on the one hand, and the
correlation between the phonological and syntactic structures, on the other.
In this respect, Chapter 5, “Mora and Syllable Accentuation: Typology and
Representation”, coauthored by Rene Kager and Violeta Martinez-Paricio,
displays morae to be dominated by material feet which takes place as a result
of certain metrical foot form constraints. This situation consequently
controls the number of morae in the metrical feet in both the head and
dependent positions. The authors argue that this situation can be encoded in
light of a minimally recursive metrical foot, which they call the internally
layered (IL) foot. Their argument is supported by data from Gilbertese showing
a metrical distribution of stress and high pitch regardless of syllable
integrity. The chapter shows that IL feet can analyze this pattern. Moreover,
it is also shown that IL feet can describe mora-counting metrical patterns as
in Tokyo Japanese loanword accentuation and Dihovo Macedonian stress.
In Chapter 6, “Word Stress, Pitch Accent, and Word Order Typology with Special
Reference to Altaic”, by Hisao Tokizaki, argues that the word order of a
syntactic head and its complement correlates with the word stress location
that is a common feature of the world’s languages. According to Tokizaki, in
Altaic languages that have word-final pitch accent, word-initial stress, and
right pitch accent, only the second correlates with word order and represents
the primary accent. The author also asserts that Altaic languages have a right
hand stress and head-final order. The chapter concludes by asserting that a
correlation between word order and word stress/accent can be found in the
world’s languages.
Part 3, “Case Studies”, discusses word-prosodic systems with a focus on
analyzing the role of both morphological structures and lexical marking of
stress/accent. In this realm, Chapter 7, “Persistence and Change in Stem
Prominence in Dene (Athabaskan) Languages”, by Keren Rice, explores the
phonological constraints as well as morphology in several Dene languages. More
specifically, the author mainly focuses on the Proto- Athabaskan *-e: and
*-e’. The chapter clarifies that the placement of a trochaic foot is a
phonological factor that plays a significant role in these languages. Along
the same line, Iggy Roca in Chapter 8, “Spanish Word Stress: An Updated
Multidimensional Account”, investigates non-verb stress in Spanish and
presents a novel analysis that is described as multidimensional because it is
full and historically justified. The proposed analysis is an elaboration of
Roca (2006, 2014, 2016), which uses Optimality Theory (OT) as an analytical
tool.
In Chapter 9, “Metrically Conditional Pitch Accent in Uspanteko”, Bjorn
Kohenlein scrutinizes pitch in Uspanteko, a Mayan language spoken in
Guatemala. The chapter includes six main sections. The first section
introduces the theoretical background. Then it presents salient facts about
the Uspanteko language in which word stress, pitch accent, syllable weight,
and vowel sonority distinctively interact. The following sections demonstrate
a metrical analysis of monomorphemic words in Uspanteko, followed by a brief
discussion of the representational status of glottal stops and accentuation in
morphologically complex words. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of
the main proposal indicating that the tonal contrasts in Uspanteko are derived
from an opposition between trochaic and iambic feet.
In contrast, Chapter 10, “Focus Prosody in Kagoshima Japanese”, by Haruo
Kubozono, presents a discussion of prosody in a southern Japanese dialect,
Kagoshima, that only has two lexical pitch accent patterns. More specifically,
it analyzes the prosodic patterns as shown by Wh questions and other focus
constructions in Kagoshima Japanese. The author starts with a brief
description of the main structure of question intonation in this dialect,
clarifying some phenomena that involve the incorporation of sentence-final
particles into the sentence-final prosodic phrase. According to Kubozono,
these phenomena demonstrate focus prosody and can be generalized. He further
argues that post-focal prosodic incorporation is not only restricted to
Kagoshima Japanese but is present in other dialects and languages as well,
such as Standard Tokyo Japanese and the South Korean Kyungsang dialect. The
chapter concludes with a recommendation for future research to further explore
how this prosodic process is detected in natural languages.
In Chapter 11, “Where is the Dutch Stress System? Some New Data”, Bjorn
Kohnlein and Marc van Oostendorp, introduces new data in relation to stress
systems in Dutch that have been collected in two online experiments. The goal
is to check new data against common generalizations in the field regarding
Dutch stress, such as the presence of default stress on the penultimate
syllable and the occurrence of a three-syllable window at the end of a Dutch
word. Participants in the two experiments (i.e., 1,774 participants in
Experiment 1 and 1,631 participants in Experiment 2) were asked to locate the
stress on the given lists that included 2,000 biblical names and 461 nonsense
words. All participants were recruited from the Mertens Institute of the Royal
Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. While the results support the claim
that there is a preference for stress on the penultimate syllable, there is no
strong evidence for a three-syllable window.
Chapter 12, “Morphologically Assigned Accent and an Initial Three-Syllable
Window in Ese’eja”, by Nicholas Rollle and Marine Vuillermet, examines stress
in Ese’eja, a Takanan language spoken by 1700 people living in the
southwestern part of Bolivia and Peru. The data include a corpus of 2,000 verb
forms collected from fieldwork in the Bolivian village of Portachuelo Bajo by
the second author. The results indicate that stress location mainly relies on
two important things: syllable count and the type of morphologically assigned
stress. According to the authors, this morphological accent includes four
major kinds: dominant indexical accent, inherent transitive accent, recessive
accent with one set of tense/mood suffixes, and rightmost-preserving accent.
The authors also introduce the term “rhythmic metrical window”, which refers
to the occurrence of primary stress on a rhythmically dependent position when
the morphological accent is marked outside the metrical window in Ese’eja.
In Chapter 13, “The Scales-and-Parameters Approach to Morpheme-Specific
Exceptions in Accent Assignment”, Alexandre Vaxman discusses the main
exceptions in accent assignments. The chapter begins with an introduction to
the Scales and Parameters theory, a new parametric theory of word accent. In
the following two sections, moreover, two kinds of morpheme-specific
exceptions are described: accented dominant morphemes in a lexical accent
system and exceptionally behaving morphemes in phonological systems. In this
regard, two case studies based on Central Selkup and Eastern Literary Mari are
illustrated.
EVALUATION
This volume covers a wide range of issues related to theory as well as
typology. While the theoretical studies mainly focus on foot structures and
their representation in different systems, the typological aspect is addressed
by discussing word prosodic types and their major characteristics. It has also
synthesized and compiled a diversified body of research on the nature of
stress and accent systems, supported by accessible writing styles. Moreover,
other chapters discuss both the significant role of lexical marking of accent
and morphological structures. In addition, the volume contains a huge amount
of data discussed in well-presented examples from different languages, such as
Danish, Estonian, and African languages. The division of the book into three
carefully separated areas helps readers interested in a specific area to
easily detect certain topics.
On the other hand, I personally would have appreciated a panoramic overview of
the historical background of the issue of accent and stress systems,
summarizing the relevant key questions and findings in the field. Also,
although the overall volume contributes and extends the theoretical and
methodological debate in this growing field of research, exploring the
relationship between accent and stress research, the discussions in some
chapters tend to be general and lack sufficient contextual specifications.
While, for instance, phonetic correlates and positional prominence are
introduced in Part 1, they have not been well-articulated in those chapters
where critical and further detail are lost. Another issue that may bother some
readers is the lack of detailed methodological explanations in some chapters.
For example, Chapter 11 aims to examine existing theories against new data
using a number of biblical names and nonsense words as the principal stimuli.
However, their details have not been fully revealed and that creates
difficulty for replication with different languages and contexts.
Despite these small gaps, this book is worth reading as a highly welcome
supplement to a field whose studies renew our knowledge, provide new insights
and solutions to current theoretical challenges, and open doors to future
research. It will be of interest to a wide-ranging audience of theoretical
phonologists and scholars working on the intersection of optimality theory and
phonological acquisition.
REFERENCES
Hulst, H. van der. (2017). Phonological typology. In A. Y. Aikhenvald and R.
Dixon (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Typological Linguistics. Cambridge
University Press, pp. 39-77.
Erickson, D. & Kawahara, S. (2016). Articulatory correlates of metrical
structures: Studying jaw displacement patterns. Linguistics Vanguard, 2, 1-16.
Kager, R. (2012). Stress in windows: Language typology and factorial typology.
LinguaI, 122, 154-93.
Roca, I. (2006). The Spanish stress window. In F. Martinez-Gil and S. Colina
(eds.) Optimality Theoretic Studies in Spanish Phonology. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, pp. 239-77.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Asmaa Shehata is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages
at the University of Mississippi. Her research interests include second
language phonology with a particular focus on cross-language speech perception
and production.
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