Linguistic Literary Terms of Accentology
Linguistic Literary Terms of Accentology
Linguistic Literary Terms of Accentology
of its syllables: one might talk of the strongly accented speech of a politician,
for instance. Technically, accent is not solely a matter of loudness but also
of pitch and duration, especially pitch: comparing the verb record (as in
Im going to record the tune) and the noun (Ive got a record), the contrast
in word accent between record and record is made by the syllables differing
in loudness, length and pitch movement. The notion of pitch accent has also
been used in the phonological analysis of these languages, referring to cases
where there is a restricted distribution of tone within words (as in Japanese).
A similar use of these variables is found in the notion of sentence accent
(also called contrastive accent). This is an important aspect of linguistic analy-
sis, especially of intonation, because it can affect the acceptability, the
meaning, or the presuppositions of a sentence, e.g. He was wearing a red hat
could be heard as a response to Was he wearing a red coat?, whereas He was
wearing a red hat would respond to Was he wearing a green hat? The term
stress, however, is often used for contrasts of this kind (as in the phrases word
stress and contrastive stress). An analysis in terms of pitch accent is also
possible (see pitch). The total system of accents in a language is sometimes
called the accentual system, and would be part of the study of phonology. The
coinage accentology for the study of accents is sometimes found in European
linguistics.
(3) In graphology, an accent is a mark placed above a letter, showing how
that letter is to be pronounced. French accents, for example, include a distinction
between , and . Accents are a type of diacritic.