Excursus: Tone and accent

There are several ways in which tone can relate to stress in systems allowing tonal contrasts only on the stressed syllables. In languages such as Japanese,  underlying tone supposedly does not interact with stress, whose assignment is  independent of tone (Poser, 1984). Other prosodic systems show an interplay  between tone and metrical system. Tone is assigned on the basis of the under-lyingly accented syllables in Norwegian (Withgott & Halvorsen, 1984), while  stress is predictable from the lexical tone in Golin (Hayes, 1995). The bilateral  interaction between tone and stress is present in the Neo-Štokavian dialect of

Serbian or Croatian, as analysed in Zec (1999), where stress sets limitations on  the distribution of tone, and tone influences the structure of metrical feet.

As we have seen, the distribution of High tone in Russian is also lim-ited by the position of the stressed syllable. There has been much debate in the literature as to the classification of the systems in which the location of tone is  distinguishing stress from tone in a language which makes a distinctive use of phonetic pitch, since it is not clear whether pitch expresses phonological tone  or is used as a cue to stress. As Odden (1999: 189) expresses it, ‘The question  is whether there is ever any hope of being able to hear a difference between tone and stress: the answer seems to be that there is not.’ Despite this analytical indeterminacy, numerous attempts have been made in the literature to establish  a typology based on the relationship between accent and tone. The one in (20) below is taken from Hyman (2006: 237):

(20) Classification of languages according to whether they have stress accent, tone, both or neither (Hyman, 2006)

+stress accent -stress accent

+tone

It can be seen from the table in (20) that Russian is located in the lower left quad-rant, together with toneless stress accent languages such as English or Turkish. 

As argued previously, the present study takes an opposite stance and assumes,  together  with  Jakobson  (1929,  1931,  et seq.)  and  Halle  (1997),  that  tone  is present in the lexical representation of Russian. On this view, Russian should  go into one of the upper cells, the further question being whether it should be  grouped together with the stress accent or non-stress accent languages. There

are several phonetic and phonological cues pointing to the presence of stress in Russian. On the phonological side, all words in Russian contain only one  prominent syllable (thus fulfilling the basic requirements of obligatoriness and  culminativity), and only this syllable can support a full set of vowel contrasts. 

Phonetically, Russian stress is manifested by vowel duration, quality and inten-sity (Bondarko, 1977; Zlatoustova, 1981). According to Beckman (1986), the  latter are definitional properties of a stress accent language. So, given that both  stress and tone characterise the prosodic system of Russian, it should be clas-sified together with systems such as Maˈya and Serbo-Croatian, shown in the  upper  left  quadrant. These  languages  are  often  referred  to  as  ‘pitch-accent’,  mainly because they use F₀ to mark prominent syllables (Beckman, 1986).

There is much controversy in the present-day prosodic phonology as to what constitutes a pitch-accent language. Based on the conclusions of Beckman’s (1986) acoustic study of stress and pitch accent languages, Levi  (2005: 74) provides the following phonetic definitions.

(21) a. STRESS LANGUAGES: languages that modulate phonetic stress (cues such as pitch, loudness, duration, and vowel quality) in marking a phonologi-cally prominent syllable.

b. PITCH-ACCENT LANGUAGES: languages that modulate only pitch in marking a phonologically prominent syllable.

Hyman (2006) adduces phonological arguments against treating pitch-accent as a separate category, and concludes that pitch-accent represents a cover term  for systems which use different properties of both tone and stress systems. Fox (2000), on the other hand, draws a distinction between pitch accent and tonal accent,¹⁸ the former referring to languages such as Japanese, in which pitch  is  argued  to  constitute  a  sole  exponent  of  accent,  and  the  latter  represented  by systems in which both tone and stress interact, with tone subordinated to a  cumulative accent, as in Serbo-Croatian, Norwegian and Swedish. In turn, van  der Hulst (2014) distinguishes a further category of restricted tone systems,  which have pitch modulation on one syllable in a word, but, unlike tonal accent  systems, do not exhibit a paradigmatic tonal contrast.¹⁹

18 The term tonal accent has been introduced by Hyman (1978) to refer to languages that exhibit tonal contrast only in the stressed syllable.

19  In fact, Hyman (2006) and van der Hulst (2011, 2014) suggest that all pitch-accent systems  should be analysed as restricted tone systems. For further discussion and other proposals, see  Beckman (1986), Hyman & Wilson (1991), Ladd (1996), van der Hulst (1999, 2011, 2014), Fox  (2000) and Hyman (2006), among others.

Since both the classification in (20) as well as the definition in (21a)  are built on a premise that tone is always realised as phonetic pitch, they only  include languages that use F₀ to single out a prominent syllable. However, as  mentioned earlier in Section 4.1, there are no instrumental measurements which  would allow us to state that pitch rises are identified with word stress in Russian,  and the presence of High tone has been established based on its interaction with segmental content. Namely, it has been argued that the increased sonority con-stitutes the main exponent of High tone. In the absence of evidence for the use of F₀ to mark word-level prominence, Russian cannot be legitimately classified  as a pitch-accent language on phonetic grounds (given the definition in (21b)  above). Yet, the tonal distribution in Russian parallels closely the behaviour of  tone in the prosodic systems of languages commonly referred to as pitch-accent or tonal accent, in that in all of them the location of a H tone is fully predictable  from the position of accent. A noteworthy point of similarity between Rus-sian and pitch accent languages lies in their lack of ability to license additional degrees of stress. Levi (2005: 74) points out that ‘perhaps the most important  difference [between stress and pitch languages] is that PA [pitch accent] lan- guages do not show a secondary level of prominence, whereas many stress lan-guages do’. Interestingly, neither Russian nor Belarusian, the two East Slavic  languages  with  phonological  tone,  have  secondary  stress,  whereas  a  closely  related Ukrainian, for which phonological tone has never been postulated in  the literature, does exhibit secondary degrees of prominence (Łukaszewicz & 

Mołczanow, to appear a, b).

In phonological terms, the distribution of High tone in Russian comes  closest to the restricted tone systems and tonal accent systems, as defined by  Hulst (1999: 64) (see (22) below), with a caveat that in Russian tone is realised  phonetically not by the F₀ modulations, as in the prototypical restricted tone and  tonal accent systems discussed in the literature,²⁰ but by an increased sonority of the tone-bearing units.

(22) a. Restricted tone analysis

Pitch as an exponent of (non-contrastive) tones b. Tonal accent analysis

  Pitch as an exponent of tone, which associates to accents

20  For instance, restricted tone systems have been established on the basis of Kinga (Schadeberg,  1973),  Safwa  (Voorhoeve,  1973),  Nubi  (Carlos  Gussenhoven,  2006);  tonal  accent  systems  include Northern Pame and Yaitepec Chatino (Suárez, 1983).

Restricted tone analysis (22a) assigns a H tone to one syllable per word, either  lexically or grammatically, whereas tonal accent analysis (22b) assigns accent  (lexically or by rule), which is later associated with a contrastive tone. Let us  recall that Russian has a free stress system, in which the distribution of H tone  is subordinated to the position of lexical accent. Hence, such a system calls for  a hybrid analysis, in which accents are associated with tone, as in (22b), but  tone is non-contrastive. Adding the fact that, instead of pitch, tone is expressed  by increased sonority, the model needed to account for the Russian data can be  summarised as follows: ‘Increased sonority as an exponent of non-contrastive  tone, which associates to accents’. The next section formulates this generalisa-tion in terms of OT constraints.