pitch accent
Noun
Meaning
emphasis that results from pitch rather than loudness
Source: WordNetSynonyms
Antonyms
Hypernyms
Examples
Accent main Syllable structure often interacts with stress or pitch accent.
Europe Both Swedish and Norwegian have simple word tone systems, often called pitch accent (although they are actually contour tones), appearing only in words of two or more syllables.
One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese.
Moreover, the Danish pitch accent shared with Norwegian and Swedish changed into stød around this time.
Such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word.
This consisted of phonemic vowel length and a free, mobile pitch accent : *All vowels could occur either short or long, and this was phonemic (it could not automatically be predicted from other properties of the word).