User:Alarm/Pitch accent

For pitch accent in music, see: accent (music).

Pitch accent is a linguistic term for a variety of methods of giving prominence to an accented syllable or mora of a word, using variations in pitch (frequency). The placement of this accent, and in some cases also the way it is realized, can give different meanings to otherwise similar words.

In a wider sense of the term, ”pitch accent” is sometimes also used to describe intonation, such as methods of conveying surprise, changing a statement into a question, or giving prominence to an accented word in a phrase, using variations in pitch. A great number of languages use pitch in this way, including English as well as all other major European languages. They are often called intonation languages.

Use of pitch to mark stress in English
Pitch is one of the elements involved in the realization of stress in English words. However, research has shown that other factors, primarily the reduction of unstressed vowels, contribute to the notion that a particular syllable in a word is stressed. Linguists sometimes call such languages stress-accented languages. This group also includes German, Italian, and many other languages.

Pitch-accented languages
In contrast, in a pitch-accented language, pitch is the major or only element involved in the emphasis on an accented syllable or mora. A typical case is Japanese. The Japanese pitch accent involves a fall in relative pitch on the syllable following the one Japanese speakers perceive as accented. Just as stress in English the place of the pitch accent can distinguish words with the same sequence of morphemes, creating minimal pairs such as HA-shi (&#31672;), "chopsticks", and ha-SHI (&#27211;), "bridge".

Polysyllabic compounds in the Shanghai dialect of Wu Chinese, have characteristics of pitch accent as well. Like in Japanese, the position of the accent for a given word in Shanghainese varies due to voicing.

It is generally believed that the proto-Indo-European language used pitch accent rather than stress accent. It was also a feature of Ancient Greek, where it later changed into a stress accent.

Pitch accent used for lexical tone contrast
Other languages employ not only distinctions in the placement of the pitch accent, but also quality distinctions, resulting in a lexical tone contrast. This is the case in Swedish, Norwegian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbo-Croatian and the Dutch dialects of Limburg in the south-east of Netherlands and the north-east of Belgium. Typically, the accented syllable in these languages can take on two or more different pitch patterns, creating minimal pairs such as tanken [tánkən], "the tank", and tanken [tànkən], "the thought" (Swedish and Norwegian).

Pitch-accented languages vs stress-accented languages
This feature is often referred to simply as "pitch accent", despite being rather a concept rather distinct from the case of Japanese, where ”pitch-accented language” can be understood as the opposite to ”stress-accented language”. However, linguists have concluded that other languages can have both lexical stress and a lexical tone contrast. The creole language Papiamento has been put forward as an example of this. Swedish could be regarded as another example, and Swedish linguists generally use the term tonal word accent rather than ”pitch accent” for the Swedish contrast. In Latvian, not only the stressed first syllable, but also subsequent long syllables, can feature three different tones.

Pitch-accented languages vs tonal languages
Other linguists have used a definition of a pitch-accented language that encompasses all these cases. In this definition, a language is pitch-accented if the position of an accented syllable or mora determines the tonal pattern of the whole word (the pitch of each syllable or mora, usually high vs. low) according to a set of rules. This definition mainly serves to contrast pitch-accented languages against tonal languages. In the latter group every individual syllable can be assigned a tone more or less independently, such as in Vietnamese and Chinese. Although the pitch accent contrasts use tonal elements most linguists do not regard languages like Swedish, Norwegian and the Limburg dialects as tone languages. Others call them restricted tone languages.

Pitch-accented languages and phrasal intonation
It should also be noted that the use of accent contrast does not rule out the possibility of phrasal intonation. Swedish, Norwegian and the Limburg dialects all have a versatile array of intonation patters.

Examples from different languages
In Swedish and Norwegian, the two existing patterns are called ”acute accent” and ”grave accent” or ”accent 1” and ”accent 2”. The way the distinction is realized shows a wide variation across dialects, although in general, the latter accent has a later pitch fall than the first. The choice of accent is often predictable from the morphology of the word. In the example above, the first instance, with acute accent, is the definite form of the single-syllable word ”tank”, while the second instance, with grave accent, is the definite form of the two-syllable ”tanke”. This pattern is consistent in both Swedish and Norwegian. The accent dichotomy exists in most varieties of the two languages, but not all. For example, it is absent in Finland-Swedish and in the Norwegian dialects of Finnmark.

In the Limburg dialects, accent 1 (stoottoon, ”pushing tone”) is generally marked by a sharply falling pitch, while accent 2 (sleeptoon, ”dragging tone”) has a high level pitch.

The "standard" tonal dialect of Latvian has three tonal patterns, a high pitched "level tone" (stieptā intonācija), a "falling tone" (krīto&#353;ā intonācija) with a brief rise befor a long fall, and a "broken tone" (lauztā intonācija), normally described as a rising tone followed by a falling one, either interrupted by a glottal stop in the middle or produced using a creaky voice. For example, using the three accents, the word "loks" [luaks] means, respectively, "green onion", "arch, bow" and "window". In many dialects the second and third patterns are fused.