Do all languages have word accent?

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2012) Do All Languages Have Word Accent? Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley Introduction The purpose of this paper is to address the question: Do all languages have word accent? 1 By word accent (henceforth, WA), I intend a concept a bit broader than the traditional notion of word-level stress-accent, as so extensively studied within the metrical literature. I will thus use the term as follows: Word accent refers to the phonological marking of one most prominent position in a word. The question in my title is thus intended to mean the following: Do all languages phonologically mark one most prominent position per word? As defined, WA is designed to be more descriptive and inclusive than word stress, which refers to a common type of prominence marking, typically analyzed as the headmost syllable of a metrical structure (cf. §2). Even so, the claim has been made that all languages have word stress, and thus necessarily WA: 2 A considerable number (probably the majority, and according to me: all) of the world's languages display a phenomenon known as word stress. (van der Hulst 2009: 1) On the other hand, a number of scholars have asserted that specific languages lack word stress, if not WA in general. This includes certain tone languages in Africa, but also languages without tone: [In Bella Coola there is] ... no phonemically significant phenomena of stress or pitch associated with syllables or words.... When two or more syllabics occur in a word or sentence, one can clearly hear different degrees of articulatory force. But these relative stresses in a sequence of acoustic syllables do not remain constant in repetitions of the utterance. (Newman 1947: 132). In fact, many languages do not provide unambiguous evidence of WA—or even words (Schiering, Bickel and Hildebrandt 2010). In many cases the interpretations have been theory- dependent and highly personal: Some people see (or hear) stress where others don’t. Given this This paper, which will appear in Harry van der Hulst, Studies on Word Accent, is a second revision (April 2012) of an oral paper presented at the Conference on Word Accent: Theoretical and Typological Issues, University of Connecticut, April 30, 2010. I would like to thank Harry van der Hulst, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the earlier drafts. Harry van der Hulst has since indicated to me via personal communication that he meant “word accent” in the more general sense intended in this study.