Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
1 In the narrow sense, a suprasegmental feature which, together with pitch, duration, and sonority, makes up the prominence of sounds, syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. Articulatory characteristic (
articulation): increased muscular activity. Acoustic characteristic: increase in intensity (volume).
2 In the broad sense (also ‘accent’), the syntagmatic ( paradigmatic vs syntagmatic relationship) prominence of a linguistic element. (a) Two basic types of stress are ‘dynamic stress’ (=‘dynamic accent,’ ‘expiratory accent,’ ‘stress accent’) and ‘musical stress’ (=‘pitch accent’). Dynamic stress is achieved through intensified muscle activity during articulation (e.g. word accent in English), musical stress through change or distribution of pitch over one or more linguistic elements (e.g. Swedish, Classical Greek). These two types actually occur together, with one or the other being predominant. (b) According to the prosodic ( prosody) unit affected, a distinction is drawn between syllable stress, word or word group stress, and sentence stress. These units can carry (c) primary (=main), secondary, or weak stress, i.e. varying gradations of emphasis. (d) A further distinction is drawn with regard to the regularity of occurrence: ‘fixed stress’ refers to those languages in which stress always or almost always occurs on a particular syllable (e.g. the initial syllable in Czech, Lithuanian, Hungarian, and Finnish, the penultimate syllable in Polish, the final syllable in French), and thereby marks word boundaries; ‘free stress’ is found in Germanic languages (generally on the root syllable), Russian, Bulgarian, Spanish, and Italian. In free-stress languages, stress can be used to distinguish between different lexemes (bláckbird vs blàck bírd), different parts of speech (présent vs presént), or different grammatical categories (Ital. canto ‘I sing’ vs cantò ‘he/she/it sang’).
Stress can have a significant diachronic ( synchrony vs diachrony) influence on sound change: cf. the ‘exceptions’ to the Germanic sound shift ( Grimm’s law), elucidated in Verner’s law, which resulted from the ProtoIndo-European free stress. ( also intonation, metrical phonology, phonetics, phonology)
References
Beckmann, M.E. 1986. Stress and non-stress accent. Berlin and New York.
Burzio, L. 1994.
Principles of English stress. Cambridge.
Halle, M. and J.-R.Vergnaud. 1987. An essay on stress. Cambridge, MA.
Hayes, B. 1981. A metrical theory of stress rules. Bloomington, IN.
——1994. Metrical stress theory. Chicago, IL.
Liberman, M. and A.Prince. 1977. On stress and linguistic rhythm. LingI 8.249–336.
Schmerling, S.F. 1976. Aspects of English sentence stress. London.
Visch, E. 1990. A metrical theory of rhythmic stress phenomena. Berlin and New York.
Generative theories
Haraguchi, S. 1991. A theory of stress and accent. Berlin and New York.
Kenstowicz, M. 1990. Stress and generative phonology. Rivista di Linguistica 2.55–86.
intonation, phonetics, suprasegmental feature
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