What african languages tell us about accent typology
- The goal of this paper is to survey the accent systems of the indigenous languages of Africa. Although roughly one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, this continent has tended to be underrepresented in earlier stress and accent typology surveys, like Hyman (1977). This one aims to fill that gap. Two main contributions to the typology of accent are made by this study of African languages. First, it confirms Hyman's (1977) earlier finding that (stem-)initial and penult are the most common positions, cross-linguistically, to be assigned main stress. Further, it shows that not only stress but also tone and segment distribution can define prominence asymmetries which are best analyzed in terms of accent.
Download full text files
Additional Services
| Author: | Laura J. Downing |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-309173 |
| URL: | http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/192.html |
| ISSN: | 1435-9588 |
| ISSN: | 0947-7055 |
| Parent Title (English): | Papers in phonetics and phonology / editors Susanne Fuchs and Silke Hamann, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung, Berlin, 2004; ZAS papers in linguistics Vol. 37 |
| Publisher: | Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung |
| Place of publication: | Berlin |
| Document Type: | Part of a Book |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2013/11/14 |
| Year of first Publication: | 2004 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2013/11/14 |
| GND Keyword: | Sprachtypologie; Phonologie; Intonation <Linguistik>; Adamaua-Ost-Sprachen; Bantusprachen; Berbersprachen; Malagassi-Sprache; Khoisan |
| Volume: | 37 |
| Page Number: | 36 |
| First Page: | 101 |
| Last Page: | 136 |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 381257827 |
| Sammlungen: | Linguistik |
| Linguistik-Klassifikation: | Linguistik-Klassifikation: Sprachtypologie / Language typology |
| Linguistik-Klassifikation: Phonetik/Phonologie / Phonetics/Phonology | |
| Zeitschriften / Jahresberichte: | ZAS papers in linguistics : ZASPiL / ZASPiL 37 = Papers in Phonetics and Phonology |
| : | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-306799 |
| Licence (German): |  Deutsches Urheberrecht |
