What does Pitch accent mean?

Definitions for Pitch accent
pitch ac·cent

This dictionary definitions page includes all the possible meanings, example usage and translations of the word Pitch accent.

Princeton's WordNet

  1. tonic accent, pitch accentnoun

    emphasis that results from pitch rather than loudness

Wiktionary

  1. pitch accentnoun

    A term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words.

Wikipedia

  1. pitch accent

    A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch (linguistic tone) rather than by loudness (or length), as in many languages, like English. Pitch-accent also contrasts with fully tonal languages like Vietnamese and Standard Chinese, in which each syllable can have an independent tone. Some have claimed that the term "pitch accent" is not coherently defined and that pitch-accent languages are just a sub-category of tonal languages in general.Languages that have been described as pitch-accent languages include: most dialects of Serbo-Croatian, Slovene, Baltic languages, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Tlingit, Turkish, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish (but not in Finland), Western Basque, Yaqui, certain dialects of Korean, Shanghainese, and Livonian. Pitch-accent languages tend to fall into two categories: those with a single pitch-contour (for example, high, or high–low) on the accented syllable, such as Tokyo Japanese, Western Basque, or Persian; and those in which more than one pitch-contour can occur on the accented syllable, such as Punjabi, Swedish, or Serbo-Croatian. In this latter kind, the accented syllable is also often stressed another way. Some of the languages considered pitch-accent languages, in addition to accented words, also have accentless words (e.g., Japanese and Western Basque); in others all major words are accented (e.g., Blackfoot and Barasana).The term "pitch accent" is also used to denote a different feature, namely the use of pitch when speaking to give selective prominence (accent) to a syllable or mora within a phrase.

ChatGPT

  1. pitch accent

    Pitch accent is a linguistic feature that places prominence, or stress, on a particular syllable within a word, or a particular word within a phrase, via changes in pitch. The pitch accent can also help to differentiate the meaning of words or sentences. It is commonly used in various languages such as Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, and Ancient Greek.

Wikidata

  1. Pitch accent

    Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words. The term has been used to describe certain Scandinavian and South Slavic languages, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, Japanese, Korean, Hiaki and Shanghainese. Although it has been claimed that "pitch accent" is not a coherently defined term, it is commonly understood to refer to a language that uses phonemic tone, but where only one or two syllables in a word can be phonemically marked for tone, and many words are not marked for tone at all. In such languages, the syllable with phonemic tone typically is acoustically prominent, in a similar fashion to the dynamic stress of languages such as English or Spanish. Pitch-accented languages may have a more complex accentual system than stress-accented languages, in that in some cases they have more than a binary distinction, but are less complex than fully tonal languages such as Chinese or Yoruba which assign a separate tone to each syllable. For example, in Japanese short nouns may have a drop in pitch after any one mora, but more frequently on none at all, so that in disyllabic words there are three-way minimal contrasts such as "oyster" vs. "fence" vs. "persimmon"; Ancient Greek in contrast had obligatory tone on one of three final syllables, so that if the tonic syllable had a long vowel or diphthong, it had either a rising or a falling tone. In addition, the mapping between phonemic and phonetic tone may be more involved than the simple one-to-one mapping between stress and dynamic intensity in stress-accented languages.

Matched Categories

How to pronounce Pitch accent?

How to say Pitch accent in sign language?

Numerology

  1. Chaldean Numerology

    The numerical value of Pitch accent in Chaldean Numerology is: 6

  2. Pythagorean Numerology

    The numerical value of Pitch accent in Pythagorean Numerology is: 3


Translations for Pitch accent

From our Multilingual Translation Dictionary

  • έμφαση τόνουGreek
  • acento tonal, acento musicalSpanish
  • accent tonal, accent de hauteurFrench
  • ピッチアクセント, 音声高さアクセントJapanese
  • acento de altura, acento musical, acento tonalPortuguese
  • тоническое ударение, тональное ударение, тоновое ударениеRussian
  • 音高重音Chinese

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"Pitch accent." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 1 May 2024. <https://www.definitions.net/definition/Pitch+accent>.

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