Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
grave accent [Lat. gravis ‘heavy’]
1 Superscript diacritic serving several purposes. It indicates syllable stress in Italian and accentuated Bulgarian texts.
In French a distinction is drawn between è for [ε] and é for [e]; graphemically, grave accent is issued to distinguish between homonyms, cf. où (‘where’) vs ou (‘or’), and à (‘to’) vs a (‘has’); similarly Ital. è (‘is’) vs e (‘and’). Morphologically, a grave accent is used to indicate a short rising tone in Serbo-Croatian dictionaries and, in the Latinized Pīnyīn writing system for falling tone in Chinese.
2 
accent2
This is the complete article, containing 92 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
View More Summaries on Grave accent
