Accent as Autosegment: A Unified Account of Lexical Accent and Lexical Stress Systems

Abstract

In this chapter, we put forward an accent-based analysis of stress and tone in the so-called lexical stress and lexical accent systems, respectively. Although such systems are not good candidates for tone and stress prototypicality (Hyman 2001, 2006, et seq.), their shared features and common prosodic behavior provide a good basis for treating them on a par. Following van der Hulst (1984, 1996 et seq.), we propose that they both share an abstract prosodic autosegment (Spahr 2016), called the accent, which can be phonetically realized as tone or stress, depending on the language. On the basis of empirical evidence, we show that accents can be either linked or floating. They may also differ with respect to their inherent strength, called activity level (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016), a property that decisively interacts with phonological edgemost effects and the morphological and/or lexical conditions that control the resolution of accentual conflicts. The chapter concludes with a Gradient Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016) analysis of some intriguing patterns of accentuation from Lithuanian.