On the place of phrase accents in intonational phonology

Abstract

Many theories of intonational phonology have granted some special status to pitch features that occur at the edges of prosodic domains, contrasting them with prominence-lending pitch configurations. The standard American structuralist theory that flourished in the 1950s (Trager & Smith 1951) drew a clear distinction between PITCH PHONEMES and JUNCTURE PHONEMES, the former constituting the body of a contour and the latter describing the movements at the contour’s end. Parallel to this development, a distinction was also drawn within the Prague School between the cumulative and delimitative functions of tonal phenomena (Trubetzkoy 1958), the former including prominence, the latter domainedge marking. Bolinger (especially 1970) distinguished ‘accent’ from ‘intonation’: ACCENT referred to the distinctive pitch shapes that accompany prominent stressed syllables (now generally known, following Bolinger, as pitch accents), while INTONATION included, among other things, distinctive pitch movements at the ends of contours. A distinction very similar, but not identical, to Bolinger’s is made in the theory of intonation developed at the Institute for Perception Research (IPO) in the Netherlands (Cohen & ’t Hart 1967, ’t Hart et al. 1990), namely between PROMINENCE-LENDING and NON-PROMINENCE-LENDING pitch movements.