Pitch accent

A pitch-accent language is a language that has word-accents—that is, where one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a particular pitch contour (linguistic tones) rather than by stress. This contrasts with fully tonal languages like Standard Chinese, in which each syllable can have an independent tone. Languages that have been described as pitch-accent languages include Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Baltic languages, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Turkish, Japanese, Filipino, Norwegian, Swedish, Western Basque, Yaqui, certain dialects of Korean, and Shanghainese. 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. In this latter kind, the accented syllable is also often stressed. 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). Some 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. The term 'pitch accent' is also used to denote a different feature, namely the use of pitch to give prominence (accent) to a syllable or mora within a phrase. Scholars give various definitions of a pitch-accent language. 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)). 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. This feature of having only one prominent syllable in a word or morpheme is known as culminativity. Another 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 is not so for pure stress languages, where the tonal contours of stressed syllables can vary freely' (Hayes (1995)). 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.