Prosodic Prominence Across Languages

Current empirical work on prosodic prominence is based on theoretical developments in the mid-twentieth century, in which a generalized notion of stress (in word pairs like English insight/incite and in sentence pairs like THEY left/they LEFT) was replaced by a distinction between an abstract notion of word stress and a concrete notion of phrasal accent or prominence that applies to specific words in an utterance. Much research since then has focused on phonetic and other cues that signal such prominence. Early findings emphasized the role of intonational pitch movements; more recent research demonstrates the importance of other phonetic cues, categorical differences between pitch movement types, and nonphonetic factors like word frequency. However, the definition of prominence itself remains informal and depends on intuitions that are well motivated primarily in European languages. Recent findings point to important differences between languages. These might be accommodated in a more comprehensive theory of word and sentence stress that treats both as manifestations of a hierarchical prosodic structure of the sort assumed in metrical phonology, while at the same time allowing for significant differences of prosodic typology.