Pitch Accent in Korean

Abstract

Typologically, pitch-accent languages stand between stress languages like Spanish and tone languages like Shona, and share properties of both. In a stress language typically just one syllable per word is accented and bears the major stress (cf. Spanish sábana ‘sheet’, sabána ‘plain’, Panamá). In a tone language the number of distinctions grows geometrically with the size of the word. So in Shona, which contrasts high vs. low tone, trisyllabic words have eight possible pitch patterns. In a canonical pitch-accent language such as Japanese, just one syllable (or mora) per word is singled out as distinctive, as in Spanish. But each syllable in the word is assigned a high or low tone (as in Shona); however, this assignment is predictable based on the location of the accented syllableKeywords: tonal accent, diachrony, phonetic realization, compounds, phonological phrases, loanwords, frequency, reconstruction