+ Accent has to do with tone and stress is the cumulative effect of prominence; (3 factors) longer

duration, change in pitch, increased loudness, realized on the syllable. English has two degrees of
prominence: primary and secondary stress.

Language typologies based on the location of stress: in languages with Fixed stress, stress regularly falls
on one particular syllable, e.g. in French on the last syllable. In languages with Free stress no particular
syllable is regularly stressed, e.g. English and Croatian. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t
restrictions as to where stress can and cannot fall, e.g. Croatian does not stress last syllables in
polysyllabic words. So free stress doesn’t equal arbitrary.

In English stress can distinguish grammatical categories, e.g. n./adj. abstract vs. v. abstract

1. English is on the extreme stress-based end of the rhythmic scale. This means that the time
between consecutive stressed syllables in English is perceived as constant, and unstressed
syllables in between them tend to be quantitatively (shortened or lengthened) and qualitatively
reduced to fit into the time interval.
Croatian is closer to the syllable-based end of the scale, although it’s not as extreme as, for
example, Spanish and French, due to its 4 pitch accents. Every syllable in syllable based
languages is perceived as taking up roughly the same amount of time.
The terms stress-timed and syllable-timed are no longer used because they were based on
isochrony, or the (rhythmic) division of time into equal portions, which is actually a perceptual
illusion.

+ tonal typology

English is an intonation language; it uses variation in pitch only for expressing pragmatic, post-lexical
meaning, at the level of the intonation phrase.

tone languages in the strict sense (e.g. Chinese) have one tone per tone-bearing unit

pitch-accent languages (Croatian.. 70% of languages) are tone languages in the broad sense; they have
one pitch pattern (‘accent’) per phonological word ().