The Study of Word Stress and Accent
Theories, Methods and Data

Explores the nature of stress and accent patterns in natural language using a diverse range of theories, methods and data.

Rob Goedemans (Edited by), Jeffrey Heinz (Edited by), Harry van der Hulst (Edited by)

9781107164031, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 December 2018

440 pages, 63 b/w illus. 31 tables
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.75 kg

'… 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.' Asmaa Shehata, LINGUIST List 33.2007

Stress and accent are central, organizing features of grammar, but their precise nature continues to be a source of mystery and wonder. These issues come to the forefront in the phonetic manifestation of stress and accent, their cross-linguistic variation and the subtle and intricate laws they obey in individual languages. Understanding the nature of stress and accent systems informs all aspects of linguistic theory, methods, typology and especially the grammatical analysis of language data. These themes form the organizational backbone of this book. Bringing together a team of world-renowned phonologists, the volume covers a range of typological and theoretical issues in the study of stress and accent. It will appeal to researchers who value synergistic approaches to the study of stress and accent, careful attention to cross-linguistic variation, and detailed analyzes of both well-studied and understudied languages. The book is a lively testimony of a field of inquiry that shows progress, while also identifying questions for ongoing research.

Part I. Phonetic Correlates and Prominence Distinctions: 1. Acoustic correlates and perceptual cues of word and sentence stress: towards a cross-linguistic perspective Vincent van Heuven
2. Positional prominence vs. word accent: is there a difference? Larry Hyman
3. Explaining word-final stress lapse Anya Lunden
4. What Danish and Estonian can show to a modern word-prosodic typology Natalia Kuznetsova
Part II. Typology: 5. Mora and syllable accentuation – typology and representation Rene Kager and Violeta Martinez-Paricio
6. Word stress, pitch accent and word order typology – with special reference to Altaic Hisao Tokizaki
Part III. Case Studies: 7. Persistence and change in stem prominence in Dene (Athabaskan) languages Keren Rice
8. Spanish word stress: an updated multidimensional account Iggy Roca
9. Metrically conditioned pitch accent in Uspanteko Bjorn Kohnlein
10. Focus prosody in Kagoshima Japanese Haruo Kubozono
11. Where is the Dutch stress system? Some new data Marc van Oostendorp and Bjorn Kohnlein
12. Morphologically assigned accent and an initial three-syllable window in Ese'eja Nicholas Rolle and Marine Vuilleremet
13. The scales-and-parameters approach to morpheme-specific exceptions in accent assignment Alexandre Vaxman.

Subject Areas: Phonetics, phonology [CFH], Linguistics [CF], Language [C]