A unified account of phonological and morphological accent

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter outlines a unified theory of word accentuation rules, considering that such rules often apply within headed domains that are smaller than the whole grammatical word. These domains, called phonotactic domains, are dependent on the morphosyntactic structure of words, as well as on specific demands of affixes in forming such word-internal domains. Accentual algorithms select a ‘winning’ domain accent from pre-given ‘competing’ syllabic accents that are due to syllable weight or that are diacritic (‘diacritic weight’). As proposed in Bogomolets (2020), languages of the world choose from two kinds of selection strategies to selects winning accents, that I will here call linear and hierarchical. When resolution is linear the accent algorithm is purely phonologically driven. Accent systems that appeal to hierarchical resolution can then be called morphologically driven. However, we will see that the phonotactic structure also plays a role in phonologically driven accent systems when these have more than one accentual algorithm for different domains of the phonotactic structure.