Pitch Accent and Stress Accent

[Zaarin]

Can a language have both a stress and pitch accent (on the same syllable)?

[linguoboy]

Can a language have both a stress and pitch accent (on the same syllable)?

I'm not sure what you're asking. Pitch is one component of stress (along with loudness and, often, length as well).

[Zaarin]

I mean, can a language have accent based on both pitch and articulatory force?

[Pabappa]

Ive always pictured pitch accent being basically a variation of stress accent in which the one stressed syllable of the word can take any of several different ones, often bleeding out onto the neighboring unstressed syllabls as well. So the answer is not only yes, but also that it's a requirement for a pitch accent language to have a stress accent. But I could be wrong because Japanese is often descibed as pitch accent and it has no real difference in stress as far as I know. But still the answer to your question is definitely yes.

[vokzhen]

The two languages I know of that have both stress and tone independently of each other (Chechen-Ingush and Latvian) also pretty much have mandatory initial stress, so they don't really have a phonemic contrast between tone, stress, and stress+tone. I'd think such a thing would be unlikely. In Chechen-Ingush tone is from old stressed affixes losing stress, for example.

[Nortaneous]

the standard example here is papiamentu isn't it

[Sumelic]

Lithuanian has free stress, as well as a two-way pitch distinction between circumflex and acute on stressed long vowels and diphthongs. "Pitch accent" is not really a coherent concept.

[Zaarin]

Cool, thanks.

[vec]

Norwegian and Swedish have (mostly) initial stress and a high-low pitch system that can appear (roughly) anywhere. In Danish the high pitch has been replaced by stød which is a glottalization thingy that's a bit hard to describe.

[Viktor77]

Lithuanian has free stress, as well as a two-way pitch distinction between circumflex and acute on stressed long vowels and diphthongs. "Pitch accent" is not really a coherent concept.

Yes, Lithuanian is a very good example. Anyone who can learn Lithuanian as a second language with fluency deserves lauding and applause because that language is crazy.

[Magb]

Norwegian and Swedish have (mostly) initial stress and a high-low pitch system that can appear (roughly) anywhere. In Danish the high pitch has been replaced by stød which is a glottalization thingy that's a bit hard to describe.

Actually I would say that the pitch accent always falls on the stressed syllable in Norwegian and Swedish. The Scandinavian pitch accent always requires two syllables to work on, and the first syllable must be the stressed one. This means that monosyllabic words and polysyllabic words with final stress cannot have a distinctive pitch accent. Alternatively you could argue that all words have a pitch accent, but that the aforementioned words are required to have accent 1. (Some central dialects that have undergone apocope apparently allow minimal pairs in monosyllables, so I guess you could say those dialects are "truly" tonal. Still only on stressed syllables though.)

Unlike stress accents, where Norwegian/Swedish can have primary and secondary stress, a word can only have one pitch accent, and it will be on the syllable with primary stress. So even though "bønner" (beans) and "bønder" (farmers) are distinguished by pitch accent, "salatbønner" (salad beans) and "salatbønder" (salad farmers) are homophones, because "salat" has the primary stress.

Also, on a slight tangent, IMD the stressed syllable actually has low pitch. Norwegian dialects are generally divided into "high tone" and "low tone". The following is probably a gross generalization, but just to give you an idea: In low tone dialects the pitch on the stressed syllable is either low (accent 1) or falling (accent 2), while the next syllable is rising. In high tone dialects the stressed syllable is high (accent 1) or rising (accent 2) and the next syllable is falling. Low tone is found in the east and high tone in the west/north.

There are lots of papers on this subject. Here are a few:
http://clu.uni.no/NTT/EnDialectvariation.pdf
http://www.hum.uit.no/a/bye/papers/pitc ... t-kluw.pdf
https://bora.uib.no/bitstream/handle/19 ... sequence=1

Edit:
In my personal, not overly educated opinion, the so-called pitch accents of Norwegian and Swedish are better described as being two different kinds of stress. There's a study that suggests that Norwegians can to some extent tell the difference between accent 1 and accent 2 even when the pitch has been removed and resynthesized as a whisper: http://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/nord ... wnload/6/5, which (if true) indicates that pitch is just one of multiple auditory cues in the signal. Clearly pitch is the most important cue, but in other languages with stress accents (e.g. English) pitch can also be a key factor in distinguishing stressed and unstressed syllables.

So as a radical interpretation you could say that Norwegian has no pitch accent but four syllable types:

• Unstressed
• Secondarily stressed
• Primarily stressed default (accent 1)
• Primarily stressed special (accent 2)

...where accent 1 and accent 2 are distinguished primarily by pitch but also by other, subtler cues.

However, I don't know much about pitch accents in other languages, so I don't know whether this interleaving of the stress and pitch accents systems is just par for the course. So far the replies in this thread seem inconclusive.

[Sumelic]

However, I don't know much about pitch accents in other languages, so I don't know whether this interleaving of the stress and pitch accents systems is just par for the course.

Well, it seems to be true of Lithuanian at any rate:

An accent represents a complex of acoustic features such as, sound quality (timbre), quantity, strength (intensity), fundamental frequency (pitch), and degree of pitch separation.

[marconatrix]

Most polysyllables in Welsh have penultimate stress but with a pitch accent on the final syllable which keeps the vowel fairly clear. In stressed monosyllables both components coincide. The same is true for the small number of polysyllables with final stress. Usually these are cases where two historical syllables have fused. Stressed syllables may in fact have a low tone.