Prominence, Stress,

Accent

From Ortiz, H. 2000 “Word stress and Sentence Accent”

 REMINDER
Phonetics vs Phonology
• PHONETICS
o Articulation
o Perception/Audition
o Transmition
• PHONOLOGY
o Organization of sounds into patterns
Phonetics
Notions responsible for HIGHLIGHTING
portions of words and utterances

1. Prominence
2. Stress
3. Accent
 PROMINENCE
→ The most basic of the concepts
→ When we speak we give more emphasis to some parts
of an utterance (e.g. A syllable can stand out, and the
word containing that syllable WILL stand out)
→ It’s a PHONETIC notion
→ Four elements produce prominence at syllable level:
→ pitch contrast or movement
→ loudness
→ length
→ vowel quality
 Pitch
→Articulatory, pitch depends on the tension
of the vocal folds (VFs):
→ The tenser the VFs, the faster they vibrate,
the higher the note they produce
 Pitch
→Auditorily, it is that property of a sound
that places it on a scale from high to low.
 Pitch
→Acoustically, voicing is the source of periodic waves.
→A periodic wave is a wave that has a pattern that
repeats regularly in time.
→A period runs from one clearly identifyable point
on the wave to the next place where this point
occurs.
LOUDNESS
→Articulatorily, loudness
is caused by greater
Do you think
muscular theseand
energy
people are speaking
breath
loudly orforce.
softly?
Why?→The speaker feels
this feature as extra
energy
 LOUDNESS
→ Auditorily, the property of a sound that places it
on a scale from loud to soft/quiet.
→ The listener feels this as extra loudness
 LOUDNESS
→ Acoustically, we talk about amplitude of the
wave (a measure of the size of the pressure
variations).
→ Other things being equal, a wave with larger
variation in air pressure will correspond to a
louder sound.
→ Vowels have more energy (are louder) than
consonants (nobody would shout using only
consonants).
 LOUDNESS
CONSONANTS → softer/quieter

pi:t paIp pIkt  pek v pIkld pep

VOWELS → louder (schwa is less louder)

Ashby and Meidment
 LENGTH
→ Articulatorily, the speaker keeps
the speech sound in time (when
possible, e.g. Stops vs Fricatives)
→ Auditorily, it’s the property of a
sound that places it on a scale
from long to short.
 LENGTH
→ Acoustically, we speak of
duration and we measure it in
seconds.
 VOWEL QUALITY
→Articulatorily, it depends on the SHAPE OF THE CAVITIES
OR RESONATORS (mainly the mouth) whose function is to
MODIFY (amplify, suppress) the almost inaudible note
produced at the vocal folds (vocal fold vibration, voice)
 VOWEL QUALITY
→Auditorily, it is the feature by means of which two sounds
having the same pitch, loudness and length are still
perceived as different.

→Some vowels are perceived as weak, some as strong,

some even have dual role.
 PROMINENCE

→ All four elements play a part in making a

syllable stand out.
→ Not all an equally important part.
→ Not all four are always present together.
→ The most decisive of the elements
producing prominence is PITCH
CONTRAST.
 STRESS AND ACCENT

→ Prosodic studies

→ They have phonological

status.
 STRESS
→ Stress is a feature of the word.
→ It’s lexical.
→ It’s an abstraction.
→ It’s a decontextualised form.
→ It MAY become concrete
realization only if the word gets an
ACCENT in an utterance.
 ACCENT

→ Accent is a feature of the

utterance.
→ It’s a concrete, contextualised
category.
→ This makes it an OBSERVABLE
PHENOMENON.
 STRESS

→In our mental lexicon each word is stored in the

form of:

→ A pattern of sounds (a PHONEMIC pattern)

→ A pattern of prominences (a STRESS pattern)

→A stress in a word doesn’t guarantee that the

word will get an accent in a particular context.
→Words can get ACCENT depending on two
factors that regulate ACCENTUATION:

→ The RHYTHMIC STRUCTURE of the

utterance and
→ PRAGMATIC-DISCOURSAL principles
which regulate accentuation in terms
of...
→ WORD CLASSES (content words are much more
accentable than structure/function words)

→ INFORMATION STRUCTURE OF THE

UTTERANCE (words with given info are less
accentable than words with new info)

→ LANGUAGE SPECIFIC RULES (In English, nouns

tend to be more accented than verbs in particular
constructions)