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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: "pitch accent" vs. "tone"
In-Reply-To: Gary Bjerke's message of 13 Feb 1996 17:26:01 GMT
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Date: Fri, 16 Feb 1996 20:56:39 GMT
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In article <4fqhja$kqi@news.mpd.tandem.com> Gary Bjerke <garyb> writes:

>What distinction - if any - do linguists make between "pitch accent" and
>"tone"?  It seems to me that these represent two extremes of the same
>phenomenon, as compared to "stress accent". So, are "pitch accent languages"
>the same as "tone languages? And is there a controversy over how to classify
>Japanese?

Pitch and stress are actually more closely related in their function than are
pitch and tone.  In many languages "stress" has a large pitch component, as
well as duration and/or intensity ("loudness").

Tone is a phenomenon of syllables; in languages such as Mandarin, in which
there are a very large number of monosyllabic words, it appears that tone is at
the word level, but this is misleading.  Languages such as Thai and Hausa have
large numbers of multiple-syllable words, with tone assignments for different
syllables.

Pitch (like stress), is a word-level phenomenon, being assigned to one or more
syllables in a word, sometime predictably (as in German, Latin, or Polish, for
example), sometimes not (as in Greek, Sanskrit, or Japanese, among others).
Once the assignment is made, various phonological processes and rules may apply
to spread the effects of pitch (or stress) to other syllables, but these *are*
predictable (within the language in question).

There is no controversy over the nature of the Japanese accent of which I am
aware; although I am an Indo-Europeanist, I try to stay in touch with Japanese
accentology because of its relevance to the PIE accent system.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
