Positional Prominence vs. Word Accent: Is there a difference?

Abstract

UC Berkeley Phonology Lab Annual Report (2015) Positional Prominence vs. Word Accent: Is there a difference? Larry M. Hyman University of California, Berkeley Paper Presented at the Workshop on Word Stress and Accent • Universiteit Leiden • 15-17 August, 2014 “... not all feet are rhythmic in nature....” (Crowhurst & Teodocio Olivares 2014: 88) Introduction One of the major unresolved issues in the study of word-accentual systems is determining what exactly counts as accent. In languages such as English, where prominent syllables are uncontroversially identified by a combination of effects on both the suprasegmental features of pitch, duration and intensity as well as on segmental realizations, there is no hesitation in attributing these effects to stress and metrical structure. Controversy arises in languages where the effects are less pronounced, have little or no effect on segments, or mark phrasal domains rather than words. The purpose of this paper is to show that the positional prominence effects that are found in several African languages claimed not to have stress can be identified with a more general notion of “word accent”. In what follows I show that while stem-initial and word- penultimate prominence can be identified as word accent in the sense to be defined in §2, the foot structures involved in prosodic morphology should instead be identified as templates that may be quite independent and distinct from word accent. I begin in §2 with a brief introduction to the problems involved in identifying and characterizing word accent. I then present three African case studies of apparent metrical phenomena in Ibibio (§3), Punu (§4), and Lulamogi (§5), each followed by discussion of whether the phenomena in question should be identified with the more familiar effects of stress-accent. Some general conclusions are presented in §6. The problem Despite the extraordinary amount of research on the subject, a number of issues continue to plague the study of stress and accent. On the conceptual side there is the question of what counts as “stress” or “accent”. Definitions of stress such as the following (Hyman 2006: 231) are often too inclusive. (1) A language with stress-accent is one in which there is an indication of word-level metrical structure meeting the following two central criteria: a. b. obligatoriness: every lexical word has AT LEAST one syllable marked for the highest metrical prominence (primary stress) degree of (O BL H EAD ) culminativity: every lexical word has AT MOST one syllable marked for the highest degree of (C ULM H EAD ) metrical prominence Therefore: Every lexical word must have ONE AND ONLY ONE (primary) stress