Word-prosodic typology

Abstract

Numerous proposals have been advanced as to how prosodic systems should be typologised. In this paper I distinguish two prototype systems, tone and stress accent, which, unlike systems analysed as ‘pitch accent’, have two inviolable, definitional properties: (i) obligatoriness (every word has at least one stress accent); (ii) syllable-dependency (the stress-bearing unit is necessarily the syllable). In contrast, the oft-cited criterion of culminativity (every word has at most one tone/accent) not only includes tone/accent systems that are neither obligatory nor syllable-dependent, but also culminative non-prosodic features that are clearly not accentual. I argue that there is no one pitch-accent prototype. Instead, since tone and stress accent may co-occur, and since languages may ‘pick and choose’ between the non-definitional properties that tend to cluster within the tone vs. stress-accent prototypes, there is a range of intermediate (and possibly indeterminate) word-prosodic systems which may or may not be best seen as ‘types’.